The Minstrel Boy
by phantomwriter05
Summary: In 1940, on the last day of "The Battle of Britain", a shot down RAF Pilot is saved by figures of the past whose love lights the dark road home.
1. Chapter 1

_"He was born a pauper  
To a pawn on a Christmas day  
When the New York Times  
Said God is dead and the war's begun  
Alvin Tostig has a son today_

 _And he shall be Levon  
And he shall be a good man  
And he shall be Levon  
In tradition with the family plan  
And he shall be Levon  
And he shall be a good man  
He shall be Levon"_

" _ **Levon" – Elton John**_

* * *

 **Prologue**

 _1937_

Thunder rumbled with elemental power over the lush countryside. Rolling hills of green waved and fluttered like coordinated flocks of geese as the frost clung to the blades. The first winter storm of the New Year was brewing and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. They'll say that it'll pass overnight, be gone by the morning with new snow left on the lawns and fences. But as for the storm brewing in the stately manor of a great estate, one of the last, it has been building for a long time and was ready to unleash its fury. Behind giggles in the nursery, walks with grandfathers, and visiting farm animals, there was conflict of the unresolved. A question looming that no answer would satisfy. It was a car crash, a tragic accident that carried wounds of the heart and the soul that were wrapped in bandages for sixteen years. A new love, a new name, a new family had been fit tightly around the grief. It was enough for some. It was enough for her, till it was gone …

But it had never been enough for one who had been forgotten. It was never enough for him.

A young man stood in a dark bedroom taking in the final scene. Lightening illuminated clothing on the floor, and stacks of books on aviation and maps of Palestine. In folders on the desk were stolen reference books from the Oxford Library on ancient societies of Egypt and Hargrove's books on The Crusades opened. A Notre Dame 'Fighting Irish' pendent tacked to the wall next to an American Football that hadn't been used for some time. He had one leather bag open and inside was the important things. His comfortable adventuring clothing was rolled up and stuffed unorganized within. There was a framed picture of his two beautiful cousins and himself on Coney Island. But most important of all was a piece of folded cloth in his hands. No one knew he had it. It was a secret, the last secret between him and his Grandmother Isobel on the day she died. Her illness was the only thing that could bring him back here. It was a place filled with ghosts, common and grand, saintly and pompous, unfamiliar and painfully personal. Downton Abbey, a grand palace of crumbling stone and brittle windows.

And they keep telling him it will be his someday.

He unwrapped the cloth in his hands and stared at the items pinned to it. They were campaign pendants, regimental stripes, and great medals for the commendations of valor at all the horrible places with the famous names, "The Somme" and "The Battle of Amiens". They were the honors that should've been pinned to a uniform of a proud war hero. That uniform was still here, down in the basement, in a trunk with the Lord's old tails and the footman's livery. It was where it belonged, where the memory of the man belonged to everyone but the young man. Of all the memories of smiles and tears that lived over the centuries of this house, it was the ghost of a father who only saw his son once, held him for only a minute that haunted the young man for the rest of his days. It haunted him, because it didn't haunt anyone else. His birth, his existence was supposed to be a happy ending. His granny told him that when he was small, when his mother was nowhere to be found.

But more and more he felt something different, felt different. Eight years of exile in America, sponsored by a great-grandmother he didn't know that he saw last six months into his stay. It was a cover story of needing to find some business or trade to save the Grantham family legacy, to protect a dead father's invested fortune by way of thinking for a new century. But all the years and great adventures traveling the far corners and heart of America didn't make him feel like he was there for the family, for an aging grandfather. He felt like a tossed away item, a cog of a machine bent in the forge. His purpose staked from the moment he was born. He was an answer to someone else's problem, not the product of a happy ending. In his heart he knew the truth of his life.

George Crawley had wandered eight years, through hardships of a depression, with the understanding of what happens to great wishes on a shooting star that never come true.

He was a handsome youth, with his Aunt Sybil's face, his Granny Cora's eyes, all under a mop of their shared black Levinson curls that had washed out the Crawley blond of his toddler days. George folded the cloth over his father's war medals. The tall figure was under a watchful gaze that gave him the same sinking feeling that he had in his stomach all the times he was sick, all the times he was hurt in his young childhood. It was the maternal look of worry that only Anna Bates could give the young man.

The Lady's Maid was still pretty in her matured days, with eyes that were wise beyond a hundred lifetimes. There was a warmth that illuminated from the woman that made anyone she befriended or cared for feel lucky. And right now when she looked at him the way she always had, he knew that there was guilt in thinking so many times that this place was a tomb. Especially, when there were still great people here that made the estate more than a crumbling heirloom.

"You're not giving it enough time, when your father first came here …" The maid tried to reason.

"He had a reason to stay, Anna. I don't." He cut her off.

The eyes of the maid, perched on his bed, shined with maternal scorn. "And your family, that's not enough for you?" She baited with disapproval with a tilt of her head.

"Look around, Anna?" He pushed. "Aunt Edith runs her magazine, Marigold is the Prima Ballerina for her Ballet Company, Sybbie runs the auto shop for Uncle Tom's dealership in London … and mom … mom." He clenched his jaw at the very mention of the woman as gazed over at his father's medals. The leather rustled as he thrust them in his bag aggressively and began closing it.

"And they're all down there at dinner, right now … the only thing that's missing is you." She countered softly.

He looked into the warmth exuding from the mature woman's eyes and for a moment his anger and resentment faltered. His brash teenage nature and stubborn heart pierced by a loving memory of happy times in the cold autumns and bright Christmases in the house. She looked right through him and knew what was going on in his mind. She knew of the feelings of abandonment and self-doubt that ate at him almost intuitively. For years, she knew it would come and it worried her. She felt bad for George Crawley all those nights he had been away in distant land far from home. All the nights when she'd watch her own child sleep in his room, safe and secure, knowing that he was loved and wanted. She had hoped that her warm smile and hand held out for George to take, like when he was so small, was an olive branch to a nostalgic comfort. But some would say when he turned away from the hand; his cold stubbornness was too much like _her_ for his own good.

"My point is that everyone has their own lives, and I refuse to be wed to this crypt." He snapped at her, pacing to his closet. He deflected his feelings. Deciding to harp on all the excuses he told himself were the real reason for what was going to happen. "For no other point, but to carry on the prestige of a bunch of bleeders playing king of the county." He snarked with distaste as he began digging through hung dresses and blouses. The room wasn't his, he didn't live at Downton Abbey. Since George was six years old, he had called Crawley House, his 'Grams" house, home. It was only at the begging of his Granny Cora that he not stay by himself in a gloomy old house that his Grams had just died in. So he had been sharing a room, a bed, with Sybbie. It was temporary, till he made a decision, till tonight.

"And they said you sounded American when you lost your accent." There was a fondness to the lady's maid's sarcastic bite back.

Anna Bates memory was suddenly swimming of another handsome young man. He was another Crawley, he had blond hair not black, and lighter blue eyes than the boy. But just like his child, he also swore that he would never be changed by this place as well. And it was when she realized that it was worse than they all could ever imagine. George Crawley wasn't just _her_ and he wasn't just _him_. He was both of his parents all at once …

And god save the King.

She watched the young man for a moment longer her heart sinking, knowing the mind of a woman she had served for all of her adult life. There was no talking her out of something she had set her mind to. And there would be no talking that woman's only child out of what he planned to do either.

"I'm not sure funding a dig in Acre, for Crusader treasure, is what your Great-Grandmother Levinson had in mind when she left you most of her fortune." Anna picked up a navy blue scarf from under the leather bag.

"What fortune?" He asked rhetorically looking under his bed. "She and uncle … 'what's his face' lost most of their money in '29." He replied. "I was lucky enough that the old bird told me where she hid the _'bootlegger stash'_." He popped up item-less.

"Shouldn't that money belong to Her Ladyship then?"

"Great-Grand's dying wish was for me not to give it to her."

"Such cruelty."

"She wasn't the most pleasant woman in the world, I give you …" He grunted as he got to his feet. "But I think she didn't want Granny to have it, knowing she'd sink it into this place, just like everyone else."

"Sounds about right, no disrespecting the dead."

"You can't offend me, about the crazy old lady. You know, before she sent me out west, her direct instructions when I last saw her was for me to blow my allowance on fast horses, even faster women, and the best booze in Hollywood … I was ten years old."

The maid was grinning ear to ear at the memories of old Martha Levinson's usual shake ups to the family. But after a while there was a deep pause of disappointment, the longer she watched him. She knew that she could not keep the young man, nor change his mind. She walked toward the teenager who was still looking through Sybbie and his drawers. When he turned, she wrapped the cotton, navy blue, aviator's scarf, made for him by Isobel Crawley before he was sent to America, around his neck. He seemed surprised and astonished for a moment at the magic conjuring of the very item he was looking for. But after a moment it slipped into a sad smirk as she looped it the way she used to before their walks to the village every Saturday to get Mrs. Patmore's last minute ingredients.

When she was done, she cupped his cheeks with her hands as he leaned down and gave her a peck on her forehead. There was finality in the way they embraced. Her arms were in a worried vice around his neck, needing to stretch to her tipy-toes just to reach him. She sniffled remembering how small he used to be in her arms in the first weeks of his life. When they broke apart he helped her wipe away a tear.

With a shutter she wrapped her arms around herself and watched the youth grab his bag. There was a rough smirk of bottled emotion on his face as he walked out of the room. As he passed, the woman hugged onto his arm as an escort. Before he left he grabbed his football. Together they paused as he gave one last look at the childhood room he spent so much time in with his best friend. Under the watchful eye of their Mama's Lady's Maid, he shut the door on that part of his life.

The softly lit hallway rumbled in the echo of thunder in the late evening storm. Waiting in the flickering dimness of the hall lights was a tall and stout man with bird like features leaning against the wall. He wore a sharp dinner jacket and formal household uniform. John Bates had more salt than pepper in his hair of late. But even now he seemed just as solid as when he first walked down the back steps with his old trusty cane that had a few more chips in the long years since. There was familiarity in the way the old valet greeted the young master, but he still stood at attention in respect.

"Bates …"

"Master George, I see you're packed." He spoke with a soft, kind voice. "I hope you have everything." He was surprised by the single leather duffle.

He nodded slowly, turning back toward Sybbie's door. "Everything I'm gonna need anyway." He said distractedly. "I travel light." He smirked confidently. The stalky man returned it endearingly.

There was a comfortable silence between the three, the heir, the lord's valet and his wife, the Lady's Maid. It would've been strange for any other household in the Isle of Brittan. But for young George Crawley, John and Anna Bates were more than just his grandfather and mother's servants. They were the ones who watched over him, who taught him how to tie his shoes, how to sew, how to fight, and how to pray. They were family to the boy in a way that no one could quite understand.

Seeing the emotion that was about to break free from the staunchest of former soldiers in the Royal Army, the youth cleared his throat of his own emotion. He held out the football to Bates.

"It's for JJ. Where I'm going … I doubt the Arabs play it." He chuckled. "Tell him to look it up. It's like rugby … except smarter and much more exciting." He gave the items to the valet.

"And they said you sounded American when you lost your accent." Bates snickered under his breath as he took the items for his son. The married couple shared a knowing look of teasing amusement at the boy's expense. The youth gave a grunt of light hearted annoyance at the two.

"I'm sure JJ will love it." Anna nodded letting go of the young man's arm, but still leaving a hand on his shoulder.

"Good Luck, sir." Bates shifted the leather skin ball under arm and offered his free one.

"Thank you, Bates." The teenager shook the old soldier's hand firmly.

Turning, he received one last hard hug from Anna. "Be careful out there." She said with a tear in her eye.

"I will …" He cleared his throat and sniffed.

When John placed his hand on his wife's back, she knew it was time to let the boy go. She did so with a sniffle, rubbing a hand against George's cheek. They traded one last round of goodbyes before the young man left them. After they watched his figure disappear into shadow, leaving only the sound of his boots on the carpet, Anna looked up at Bates. Knowing the boy from the day he was born till the moment they could no longer see him was hard. But being parents of a boy themselves, it made letting go infinitely harder. In their private moment in the hallway of the empty wing, a wife buried her worries in the vest of her husband who did what he always did.

Love Anna.

As George descended the staircase he stopped at the last landing and looked over the grandeur in lamplight. The soft illumination reflecting off the stone gave the old place a sacred look. The history coming off the walls in the paintings and old furniture gave the atmosphere weight. It was an anchor that hung over the young man's neck and heart. Downton Abbey was a great house of the past, which had no future in a world of tomorrow. Its paintings, its century old sundries, its prestige, all of it was like some great bear trap. These priceless artifacts snatched the future away from heir after heir, till they were old men afraid of their children, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of death. Custodians bound to a dead way of life, slaves to inanimate objects held more preciously than the lives of their own children … of their own son.

The same vile he had this morning, last evening, the morning before last, and every morning for years welled inside of him. The same hatred for everything in his life that was tossed at him since the day his father drove off and never came back from that lonely stretch of road. No choice, no life beyond these walls, worrying about the legacy of others.

He'd settle for being just one more disappointing heir in the eyes of a Lord and Lady Grantham.

He descended the last steps and halted in the middle of the foyer as he heard the overlap of conversation, the clinking of forks on plates, and bright glow of the dining room down the hallway. Once more, his teenage resentment was overcome by a moment of reason. Down that hallway were the only people he had in his life that meant anything. Beyond this house, beyond these damnedable collectibles, were the people that this place had made. It was the long histories of grand courtships, even grander loves, weddings, and births that happened in these rooms that provided him his very life and all the love inside him. With knowing all George did, there was something wrong about walking out on all of them, all of this, like some thief in the night.

"You don't have to go …"

George turned and saw a dapper man standing in the drawing room just behind him. He was a tall, handsome man in his mature years, with first signs of white hair that just dabbed his temples. He was the picture of the ease of elegance. The Butler, Thomas Barrow, stood at attention. He had an old double breasted leather pea coat over one arm.

Thunder rumbled overhead, shaking the foundations of the house and flickering the lights. George turned away from the dinner, his reprieve broken by the noise and the butler. He felt shame for the manner in which he was leaving, but not for the way he felt about the house. Knowing that tomorrow would not make it any easier to leave, nor to take another moment being trapped in hundreds of other men's dreams and legacies.

"Yes, I do, Thomas."

There was a flicker of regret and sorrow in the butler's eyes as the young man greeted him. He watched as the youth took the double breasted coat of beaten leather off his arm, setting down his bag on the couch. He slipped it on, his eyes not leaving the man as he did so.

"I think you're making a mistake, Master George."

George nodded as he buttoned the middle two buttons. "I know you do." He said compassionately.

Without a father, many times without a male companion, Thomas was young George's only friend and confidant. Many days spent walking the grounds, talking, laughing, and the boy sharing childhood secrets with a man devoted to his family, devoted to him. It pained both of them when he was sent to America. For many years Thomas Barrow was called many things, a bully, a dictator, a schemer, and a thief. But there was another side to the man that very few knew, and one of those people was Master George. A person he knew better in the exchange of letters over the years. The only comfort that the butler had was the knowledge that someday, the young man that he had grown to love like a son, would come back.

But when George rejected everything, opting to leave Downton again, after so many years being away, it crushed Thomas's world. In many ways George rejecting his birthright was the same as the boy rejecting Thomas as well. It was a hurt that did not go away, nor could be healed. A struggle of the pain of rejection, yet, the glowing pride of an independent young man giving it to the damned old gentlemen and haughty society ladies that came through the never ending cycle of Downton dinner parties like a revolving door of decadence.

Reaching into his coat pockets, the young man felt for the one thing he had requested that morning. The Butler didn't betray a facial tick as George pulled it out. In his hand was his old Webley Revolver, recently cleaned and oiled, though still weathered looking after eighteen years. The previous owner had never been a very good shot with it, though he did his best.

Matthew Crawley's revolver had been saved by Lady Sybil after his wounding, and was given to her to keep by its previous owner. Matthew had instructed the girl to keep it in her night drawer as a precaution for any wanders from the hospital who might find a way up the stairs to the beautiful nurse's room. It had come in handy in an unspoken incident with a drunken uncle of Tom Branson's on her honeymoon and stuffed within a coat pocket all the long wet way from Dublin back to Downton when being followed by police. After her death, it had sat in the weapons carbonate, till found by a small boy one day who beheld his father and aunt's revolver like the sword Excalibur. It was one of the items that he took with him to America and for eight years of adventures and fights, having the weapon was the only thing that kept the young man from being murdered in a lawless land of depression filled desperate and impoverished people.

The butler watched the youth check the chamber, unsurprised that the boy knew his way around a gun, when everyone else would be. " _ **Turkish**_ trouble?" he asked stiffly.

The cylinder clicked as the boy spun it. "Nah, been quiet since the dust ups in Mexico, Fort Worth and Newport … plus, that _**Pamuk**_ witch's gotta die at some point, right?" The youth replied distractedly not looking up.

"Not before she gets her revenge on the woman whose bedroom her son died in." There was something cold in his voice.

The young man simply shook his head. "That dusty old Ottoman Princess has wanted me dead for years. She's offered every Bounty Hunter, Cut Throat, and Assassin from Uptown, Downtown, and back alley of Constantinople and Tehran my weight in gold since the day I was born. She's come close several times … but old creaky knees haven't got me yet." George bragged giving his old weapon a gun fighter's twirl with deadly expertise.

There was a cold rebuke to the lack of seriousness in the boy's voice in the butler's face. He did not find the arrogance of youth as reassuring or admirable as he once did, roaming these halls as a footman.

"The Germans are out there in the Orient; doing the exact same thing you are as well, aren't they?" Only his eyes moved as he remained still as a statue at attention.

"The Hun sill on the marquee of your nightmares, old boy?"

"I know first-hand what they're capable of."

"Those Nazis thugs don't frighten me, Thomas."

"They do me, sir."

There was something in the butler's voice that attracted George's attention. When he glanced up he saw the pain and worries on the man's face at just the imaging of the dangers the boy was leaving home for. There was a long quiet moment between the teen and the butler. Then the young man snorted softly and nodded. He'd never say it, but he'd acknowledge the risks for Thomas's own piece of mind.

The youth pocketed the revolver and moved to grab his bag, when the butler did it for him. There was a pause between the two before he handed it back to the young master. "I know I've disappointed you, Thomas …" The young man had a sharp seriousness in his voice. "But I hope the old promise still stands." He said hopefully, eyes downcast.

The butler was rigid for a moment, but his eyes started to cloud over in a mist. "It does, sir." He cleared his throat. "No matter where you are, I'll always be your friend, Master George." He nodded.

With every fiber of their beings they wanted to hug. But those days were long gone. Though to the butler, it seemed like only yesterday he was walking down to see the new baby goats, a chain of little children holding hands, being led by a mother duck in a livery.

"Take care of yourself, old man." The youth smirked confidently.

"More you, sir." He nodded with a tear in his eye.

"You know me …"

"That's why I'm telling you."

With a shared rough chuckle the young man hefted his bag and walked out of the room, giving one last look to the butler. He patted the revolver in his coat pocket as a form of parting assurance.

But as he crossed the foyer, putting up the back of his coat collar, his chest tightened as he crossed in front of a group of people in fine gowns and tuxedos. While he said farewell to Thomas his family had ended dinner and were going through to the drawing room, when they came across George.

At first no one seemed to notice the youth, absorbed in the closing conversations. But it was when an older man in an old fashion tux stopped and stared that everyone noticed. Then it was like a chain reaction of eyes finding the young man standing there like a deer staring at headlights in the middle of the road. It wasn't his plan to let them see him, knowing that it would lead to the painfully awkward moment that he was confronted with.

An elegant and attractive older woman stepped forward. She had lightly salted raven curls and kind blue eyes, the kindest that George had ever known. She looked puzzled, lifting the hem of her black sequenced gown with silky elbow gloves.

"Where are you going, darling?" her matching accent to his was marked with a familiar girlish voice that was ageless.

The youth turned toward his grandmother and looked at the features he inherited. He felt guilty, because it had been Cora who defended him when he said that he would not come down to dinner tonight. Her compassion for the recent loss of his father's mother had paved the way for him to pack and make arrangements to leave for the London Airfields by the morning. Now that she saw that he wasn't in Sybbie and his room mourning the loss of his 'Grams', he felt shame in using her the way he had.

"So you're leaving then, are you?"

Lord Grantham was looking older. The world was changing, and though he was much freer thinking than he had been before his ulcer, he still felt he was being left behind, held up only by the love of his wife and support of his family. George could see what worrying for this house, these trinkets and paintings could do to a man who knew no other ambition. There was nothing worse in the world than watching something die, by inches, in a proud man's eyes. It was a sight that George was exposed to when he saw that his grandfather spotted the traveling bag.

"My life, my choice." He replied with a brooding staunchness.

The old man was suddenly filled with a flash of aggression. He was angered and frustrated, a vein on his forehead flaring. It was an older demon that returned to plague him, a demon birthed since the RMS Titanic sank in the Atlantic. He walked forward and might have continued till he confronted his grandson and only heir, if his wife hadn't stopped him on instinct. A lifetimes worth of marriage and love had taught Cora how to manage her husband's volatile temper, even when she was confused about a situation thrust upon her.

"Yes, your choice. And you've decided to turn your back on the centuries of work that each Earl of Grantham, every member of this family has built here!" The older man accused in sudden fury.

It was an old battle that had been fought in almost every room of Downton. Since George had returned a year ago, he had quit half a dozen prestigious schools and academies his grandfather had signed him up for, without even attending. The boy found their "proper" teachings to be a waste of his time, and Robert's money. Eight years of adventures and wandering in Depression America had colored the boy's attitudes and education of the real world. A man who raised three daughters, with no sons of his own, Robert had such fantasies of a life working with his grandson, working with Matthew's boy. And in just one year he had watched each one of them burn to the ground. Most often times than not, Robert could be found in rousing shouting matches with George about his future and that of the estate he wanted nothing to do with. It was the meeting of two exact same tempers that had been passed down from grandfather to grandson that was often separated by Cora before someone said something awful.

"I'm done arguing with you, Donk." The teenager strode into the shadows of the night, moving toward the door.

The crowd around them seemed to know that something was going on that was not being spoken. Light wrinkles and a mustache gave Tom Branson a look of distinguishment. His tired, knowing look turned toward his sister-in-law, Edith. The quite confused Marchioness of Hexham was a picture of grace and class, her golden hair reflected in the soft light of her childhood home. The girl next to her was a beautiful copy of everything fine and admirable of her mother. Even at fourteen, Marigold was a blossoming prize that was only helped by her soft demeanor, ballerina's elegance, and ever kind intentions. But there was guilt on her lovely face as she had kept silent about what she knew about the scene in front of them.

The only other one in the party of close family who had come to pay respect to Isobel Crawley, who knew of what was happening, was a girl that stood in the back. If there was ever a ghost that haunted the halls of Downton, than Sybil Branson could've been mistaken for one. The resemblance between Cora Levinson when she first arrived at Downton and her granddaughter was hard to miss, and on each visit to her mother's ancestral home, it took those who knew Cora best in the Victorian era of American Heiresses and English Lords a moment to reassure themselves that the ghost of that pure and lovely American Princess was not standing in front of them once more.

Side by side, Sybil and Marigold shared a look of guilt and sorrow. Beyond those downstairs, the two girls knew of their cousin's plans. Since the time they could remember, they had all been close in the nursery of Downton. And years and distance had not dampened their deep friendships. Though the heartache of this moment was not lessened by George's leaving. Sybil had asked him to reconsider, to not leave her behind again. Marigold had begged him in tears not to do this. All night and through dinner they had both waited on pins and needles, sharing looks across the table, hoping that their pleas would've been enough to keep their best friend at home. But seeing him deciding to walk away broke their hearts.

"George please!" Marigold called out to him.

Lady Grantham turned toward her granddaughter in alarm seeing and hearing the emotion on her face. She quickly looked to George. "Darling, where are …" Cora called after her grandson and then rounded on her husband. "Robert, what's going on?!" She asked in alarm.

"Oh, nothing Mama … just a show for my attention."

The cold voice that echoed sharply stopped the young man on a dime. He kept his back to his family as an icy arrow shot through his fiery rebel heart. The look that George Crawley gave over his shoulder was half shadowed and bitterly incredulous.

An ivory skinned woman in a form fitting, black, satin gown and long, dark, glossy locks in a peekaboo style strode from her place next to a puzzled Rose and Atticus Aldridge. She pursued the boy past her mother and father and then examined the tall young man that had inherited her posture. Her dark eyes were nearly red against her smooth pale skin. There was nothing quite as beautiful and frigid looking in the entire house as George's own mother, Lady Mary Crawley.

"Well, here I am, George." She presented herself with a mocking grandeur. "Now what do you want with me?" She sighed in haughty exasperation.

"Not a damn thing." He growled low.

When the youth turned to leave again, there was a flicker of deep hurt that flashed momentarily. But it soon left, replaced by the same, cold, superiority that returned to her ageless face.

"Honestly darling, you go through all of this trouble and now you want to be a martyr?" Mary prodded. "Don't be a child." She chastised with a sigh.

George stopped again. When he turned, Mary was astonished when she saw that her only remaining child was incensed. In the shadows of the columns, in the way that he was looking at her, for a moment she thought she saw someone else. A face that made her heart skip a beat, then ache with the freshness of an old wound that would never heal.

"What would you know about children?" He asked angrily. Mary's shock wore off, her cold demeanor shattered for a split second too long. The woman deflected from the angry look that she hadn't seen in so long.

"Oh, please, I've lived with your Aunt Edith long enough …" She motioned her head behind her.

Edith bristled at the pot shot. But, even under duress, she remained silent. The Marchioness had learned long ago when to engage her sister in battle and when to let her hang herself.

George dropped his bag on the floor with a clank and strode toward his mother. Lady Mary was confused at the borderline rage that the comment about his aunt had sent her son into. It was if she was a stranger that had insulted his own mother. He stopped at the half-way point. Tom moving to intercept if need be. He had become an old referee to the shouting and slamming doors that became the normal since the unhappy reunion between George and … everyone.

"You know what? When I was in New York, Memphis, New Orleans, and in the Rio Grande Valley … Aunt Edith came for me. It didn't matter how dangerous the place, or the people where. It didn't matter how desperate or deadly the situation was. No matter where I was, she came when I needed her. And she brought Marigold, Sybbie, Uncle Tom, and Granny for the ride. So tell me, mother, where were you all those years? Huh? WHERE WERE YOU WHEN MY BACK WAS AGAINST THE WALL?!" He roared.

The beautiful, living, ice sculpture had the decency to look ashamed for a moment. Looking back at her sister she saw the confirmation. There was no lie in Lady Edith's expression, eyes that had seen the danger and desperation of the American Depression first hand. But, then, With a sigh, Mary had the look of bewildering entrapment upon her. She shook her head and came back at her son.

"This is what this about isn't it? Because, I didn't visit you in America? I didn't hold you enough when you were little? I didn't hand feed you pealed grapes? Is that what you want from me?" She sighed. Suddenly she held her gloved wrists out as if to be cuffed by George. "You want me? Here I am." She replied aloofly. "You want to clamp me in irons to your bed posts? Very well, we'll sleep together. You want to put a bejeweled collar around my neck and take me for a walk around the grounds on a leash? By all means, I could do with the exercise." She baited with a cold, mocking, snobbish tone.

"Mary …!" Cora stepped in. Her head shook in silent disbelief of the ugly pretentiousness in her daughter's tone.

"Don't play with me, I don't deserve it, not by **you**!" her son snarled in near rage.

For a moment the words sent her to a table in an empty dining room. There were two people, a boy, a girl, a plate of sandwiches, and their mismatched glasses. A man with bluer eyes, blond hair, but the same brave heart and steadfast love looking at her. It was the first moment she realized how much she loved him, the first time that another man's love meant so much to her. It was so many years later, and yet it was still all she wanted again. And the boy who was looking at the cold beauty like she was his most hated enemy, he would never know how much it destroyed her see the only part of the man she loved left looking at her with so much resentment.

It was only then, in the disapproving eyes of her mother, and the rage in her son, that Lady Mary came to realize that this was real. He might have looked like her twin, but he wasn't Sybil threatening to run off if Papa fired their revolution chauffeur. This wasn't like a little girl wanting Carson to give her the silver to sell in the village so she could run away. It wasn't even Rose attempting to run off to marry one of her dozens of male suitors of the month. How could she underestimate Matthew Crawley's child? How could a boy she saw the man she loved, in his every breath, not mean what he says?

He was truly leaving.

"Oh … now I'm some fairytale villain, because I remained here and protected your father's legacy. A legacy you want to throw away, because, some blind old Turk in a fez, who works the bathroom at some Peregrinator Club, told you about hidden Templar relics in the Holy Land."

"You'd know all about the Turks, wouldn't you?"

There was a sudden cold silence that broke out from the small crowd. Some mouths hung open. Some eyes darted away from the painfully awkward verbal slap to Lady Mary's face. The ageless woman's red tinted eyes were wide as silver dollars, her mouth thinned in stunned outrage. George squeezed his eyes shut as if he were in pain. The shameful insult cost him ten years off his life, and just a little bit of his soul. He quickly turned away in shame, his hand cupping his heart.

Mary's shock turned into a frigid fury. Her coy, sarcastic, toying was starting to become full contact sparing. The more everything was slipping away, the more her frozen veneer was giving way to temper. She watched the young man turn to retrieve his bag, trying to get out before it got any nastier.

"You want to ruin this family, just to punish me?! Is that what you want, George?!" She pursued her son as far as Tom's cautionary hand would allow her to go.

"No!" George's voice was sharp as a flickered blade when he swung around. "This is about a woman whose _child and husband died ten years ago_ , and has used it as an excuse to neglect everything and everyone in her life, even her own son!" He pointed his finger at her accusatorily.

Mary was shocked into silence at the mention of the one thing, the one tragedy, which no one in the house has talked about since it happened. It had been neglected for so long that it almost seemed as if it had never happened. It was a string of horrible events and one mother's terrible decision in a desperate moment of panic that was too painful for even the servants downstairs to talk about. A wave of sorrow came over Mary's face and she could not hide the crippling pain.

"Don't you **dare** justify turning your back on this family by bringing up Cora and Henry! Don't you dare! Haven't you hurt me enough for one night, for one lifetime, George?!" Mary snarled.

"That is exactly what this is about, Mom! It isn't about Palestine, Downton, or dad's legacy. This is about a selfish, bitter, grown woman, who only thinks of her own grief! Of herself! Cora was my sister, my world! You were her mother! You and Henry were supposed to protect her! But instead you put her life in my hands, **my** hands! I was a child! _A CHILD_! I didn't have a goddamn chance! And when I failed, when she was gone, I needed you! Christ, I needed you more than I've needed anyone else in this world! But you couldn't see past your own grief! So you gave the responsibility over to Anna and Bates, Thomas, Grams, and finally to America! Anyone or anything you could so you didn't have to see the boy who couldn't save your daughter!" He shouted at Mary.

"So, don't you ever accuse me of turning my back on this family! You did it long before I did. The difference is that I won't placate to "Queen Mary", and put you on a pedestal like everyone else around this goddamn graveyard. And I'll be damned if I'll let you trap me in this crypt the way you did Dad, Henry, and any other poor bastard that's next on the Black Widow's menu. And all so Lady Mary Crawley can be the pretty Princess of the county on her sad little hill!"

There was nothing left to say after George's tirade. The tired and pained eyes of the spectators watched dejectedly as the young man, fighting the black hole of sorrow in his chest, pick up his bag and walk toward the door. His profile covered in darkness and shadows as the thunder rumbled and rain slammed against the windows.

"George …"

When the boy gripped the door knob, he stopped. There was something in the nature of all humans, Pavlovian, to respond to the voice of their mother calling to them. George's eyes were closed as the sound of raindrops slapped against the gravel driveway and thunder pounded the silence.

"If you walk out that door … don't you **ever** come back!"

The figure of the young man paused in the night's shadows, head cocked to the side toward the family. Whatever expression was on his face was cloaked in complete darkness. Lady Mary's ultimatum hung in the air over everything that was and will be in the once great household.

The smell of the damp and frigid night air swirled through the foyer when the door was thrown open. A darkness of sorrow and defeat swept through the room as they watched the last heir of Downton stalk into the wintry night, slamming the door behind him.

Mary stood still as a statue watching the door, a gloved hand to her mouth, tears suddenly streaming down her face. Around her, Marigold let out a sob and fled up the stairs. Edith hesitated a moment, her face twisted in depression and confusion, before she chased after her daughter. Rose and Atticus went to find Thomas for a glass of bourbon at the kindly request of Lady Grantham as Robert collapsed into a seat in defeat.

"George!" Sybbie rushed to the door and collected her coat. The girl ran out into the sleeting storm after her best friend, gown, gloves, and all her lovely finery.

"Sybil!" Tom ran to get to his daughter as the power flickered in a violent roar of thunder.

In a crowded room, Lady Mary stood completely alone. Slowly she took a seat, her eyes glazed over continuing to watch as Tom was calling after Sybbie. The woman flinched as the door closed behind him, as if someone had fired off a gun. She waited and waited, hoping for the possibility of what her heart truly wanted, but it never happened … he never came back. Slowly her face sank into her gloved palms and she couldn't shake the only thought in her head. Mary Crawley had done it again …

She had ruined everything.


	2. Chapter 1: Kathleen Mavourneen

**_1940_**

There was a melancholy dreariness in the gray skies that fell over the smoking city. Old buildings of brick and mortar, white washed walls, and cobble stone that had stood for centuries were in ruins. The smoke stacks reaching high, high, into the air, signaling the grief and anguish of a city, of a people, of an Empire. The once mighty capital of the civilized world was in smoldering ruins everywhere you stepped. The British people had seen the face of war before, but not like this. There was something diabolical, heinous, and terribly improper about the cruel sharpness of the dagger that was driven straight through the heart of the very essence of a civilization. There was nothing more grotesque or trying of the heart and soul than seeing a starving child sitting in ruins waiting for a mother, a father, a savior, to return to them.

They'd never complain, they weren't made to fight the machine, the rearing of centuries of peasantry, but they did pray. And there was something primal, savage, in their desires. The people of London, like thousands of other civilizations around the world in drought, drought of hope, drought of safety, drought of a future, prayed for rain. They'd take anything today, the heaviest cloud, bloated and as black as the Fuhrer's heart itself. All they begged for in their quietest moments was some divine providence to keep the bombers and fighters at bay. They'd only want a day, a night, a blessed moment to themselves before the air raid siren, the panic, the fear, and the horrible death that came for them. They'd give anything to keep the German bombs off them for a moment longer.

London was a city of fear and nightmares. The frightened cries of terror were the night's bubbling chorus supported by the tenor of whistling bombs and the soprano of the incendiary explosions. Ancient streets filled with the glow of fire, eating history, commerce, and the memories of the past. Amongst the chaos were the faceless shadowed figures, as tall as giants against the ruins, flying by in the firelight, all trying to escape the inferno. But here in the first moments of dawn, there was an odd quiet that fell over the scene of the night's anarchy. As the light came in Egypt on the morning after the first Passover, the slaves to the fate of this city emerged from their shelters and subway tunnels into the smoldering ruins to see where the reaper had passed.

The morning brought hope that the garish sun had gone to bed and had not awoken. A thick cloudy day would be Christmas come early. But when the sun shined anew, they bowed their heads, buried the dead, and tried to continue on, somehow, someway. Hell did not stop when it was winter outside and so the damned carried on in their torment as the demons across the channel would come again today.

But the sun brought more than just the Luftwaffe to London. It brought the daily struggle at King's Cross Station. Every night, families in the cinderblock cellars underground huddled together. In these horrible nights their children fell asleep into their mother's breasts to the roar of the bombs, the dust falling on their heads, the screams of the dying. Every day hundreds of mothers leave their shelters with the children and race across town for the first tickets of the day out of London. It was a mad dash, as women and children with every last penny to their name struggled to find room on the next train out. Then there were the truly desperate. The ones, who would put their child's name down in a registration book, give them over to a man in a blue uniform, so he might put an identifying number on their jacket. They'd be spread across the country side, relying on the hospitality of strangers, never knowing if they'd ever see their mother and father again when this was all over.

Lady Mary Crawley stood on the platform next to a red car commuter engine. As the bag men, sallow eyed, tired, wearing a tin hat and flak jackets, carried her luggage into the first class compartments. Her red tinted eyes seemed guilty as she watched them work. She'd dare to sound like her father if she'd point out the admirable discipline of the men of this country. That even in a time of such desperation, the baggage handlers still came to work each day and helped a noble woman with a life not so completely changed as others. There was an absurdity to it and yet a great comfort that was mutually shared. There was a job to do, a job that still existed, and life went on, and would continue to go on. Even in the face of oblivion. It was all very proper …

It was all very British.

She thought that her Aunt Rosamund would've had a wicked laugh at that. She had a way of pointing out the absurd and being vaguely supportive or critical of it all. She had been quite an intelligent lady, but then anyone who grew up under Violet Crawley's rule would be expected to have some sort of head on their shoulders. It seemed ironic now, after the funeral that she might have been too British for her own good … maybe they all were. They had been evacuating London for months before "The Blitz" and yet Rosamund had no intentions of leaving her home. At the time Mary found it quite commendable when her father, mother, and sister found it impractical. Rosamund had been convinced that the British Government would come to terms with the Germans after Dunkirk. She had believed without a doubt that Hitler had no interest in Britain. Then, when the first waves of sorties hit the Isle she still remained in her London house when her brother demanded that she return home. Rosamund refused to obey, saying that the German's were only after the military targets and that she was in no danger. She had Mary convinced, when she hadn't convinced anyone else.

That was till the German planes hit London.

There was a time Mary wished that she could have her Aunt's life. She had all the money in the world, a posh house, on a posh street, in the capital of the world. Her life was exclusively her own, with any desire at her fingertips. And yet, there was something very tragic of her death beyond the stray Nazi bomb that killed her. The solitude of her life was the solitude of her death. Rosamund had died terribly and utterly alone. And the sorrow of the matter was that she didn't have too. Her family had wanted her to come home, and she refused to do so out of some misplace independence that Mary so wished to have been known for someday.

Thinking of it all, Lady Mary pondered that maybe it wasn't that they were too British. Maybe it was just them alone, the aristocracy. She saw the mothers and their children, watched the lines of youth with numbers on their jackets, all trying to escape this place. It had always been easier to think that the Lords and Ladies were a class a part, that in war, they would be treated differently. But spending just a night in this city she used to love so much, now under siege, she understood that those days were over. Across the channel, the Nazi did not care if you were a lord or lady of a grand manor or a simple dock worker; Hitler would destroy you all the same. The old days were dying with the rest of the British people, and she'd be a fool if she couldn't see it now, here, at the end of all things.

"Tommy … Tommy …"

A voice whispered behind Mary. She turned her head to watch as a young woman crept out of the bushes. She was covered in soot. Her plaid button down and a pencil skirt were stained. She seemed so young. A grey shawl covered her head till she checked the platform for Bobbies.

"Tommy!" She called quietly.

Lady Mary turned toward a line of refugee children that the young girl was calling toward. There amongst the tired and nervous children, a boy looked up. He was no more than five years old. He wore a blue corduroy jacket and matching pants, like the girl, he was also covered in soot. But when he saw her, the small child's doe blue eyes lit up. A big smile of crooked and missing teeth came over his cherub face. Quietly, he slipped from the uniformed foremen's sight and ran toward the girl. Mary couldn't help but smile at the little bounce in his sprint. He was such a small thing trying to cover a lot of ground with such short stride.

Small boy and mother came together in a hard hug. The young woman burst into tears as she lifted him up in her arms. She kissed every inch of his dirty face and pulled him close to her. "Oh god, oh god, oh god, my wee, wee babe, oh my brave baby!" She sobbed into the boy's hat. Mary watched over the emotional scene with a lump in her throat and the ghost of the old feelings.

What it was to see your child run to you, to hold him in your arms. To know nothing could harm him as long as you had him. She knew the assurance of the deepest love and devotion to one small person, than to anything in the world, in the universe. She still knew how his hair smelled, how warm his body got when he sat in her lap, how he showed just a bit of teeth when he smiled, like his father. Her heart was filled once more with an old love, an old devotion, and an old pain. The pain of the past and of a future when the one thing she lived for was missing from her life. Like the young woman, Lady Mary would've given anything, snuck through the bushes, climbed the gates, and stormed the ramparts of the Tower of London itself, to have one last hug, one last word, one last glance of her own child before he left from her sight, sound, and touch.

"Miss? Do you have a ticket, Miss?"

Two station agents in blue uniforms arrived upon seeing one of the refugee children in the arms of a strange girl. The young woman didn't address them, she only held onto her child as long as she could till they asked her to leave. There was nothing quite as horrible as watching a mother being separated from her child. A part of Mary wanted to speak up, to say something to the men who were escorting the crying girl back to the gate. They weren't unnecessary in their forcefulness, but there was something undignified in watching a young mother calling to her child to be good, be smart, and to be safe while she was dragged away. The boy was left by himself crying on the platform as his mother was tossed back with the rest of the rabble trying to fight their way to the ticket offices. But the words of protest seemed to die in Mary's throat. She could fight her lady-like behavior and propriety in these situations, but she'd lose. It wasn't in her to shake the boat or to fight the system. It was cold, but she did believe that the boy would be safer in the country side than here. It was why the girl gave him up, after all.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to turn away from the crying child that was now sitting on the platform by himself. The men in tin hats were busy trying to load the trains, while the other children only stood by and watched the young boy shiver and sob for his mother. It wasn't a hard scene for the children, they had all scene it before, felt it before. They lived in sorrow, walked in a living nightmare. They were the children of this war ... this awful, terribly modern, war.

Suddenly the boy's cries reached a high pitch wailing that sent goose bumps down Mary's spine. The entire platform paused. It was as if the entire world froze for a split second. Then like a crack of a gun at a race, everything spun into chaos. It didn't occur to Lady Mary what was happening till her mother stuck her head out of the window of their compartment.

"Mary, hurry!" Cora shouted over the wailing.

When her daze fell away, she realized that it was not the boy's cries, but a siren. She looked around as the air raid warning echoed into the quiet morning. Bag men tossed the last of Lord and Lady Grantham's luggage into the train without tact or thought. She watched them run off. There was a thunder of a stampede outside the gate to the chorus of terror filled shrieks. Quickly men in blue uniforms and tin hats were herding the children into the box cars, screaming at them to get on. Mary's head was suddenly swimming in old reflexes. In her mind caught in a tidal pool where there was only one name that kept flashing and screaming in her mind.

"George!"

"Mary, Mary, come back!"

Both her parents were shouting at her, Tom Branson even coming to the compartment door as the whistle of the train screamed over the air raid siren and the distant echo of Anti-Aircraft guns blazing into the sky. But her little boy's name and smile were the only things that came to mind as she rushed to the middle of the platform and picked up a small body that was so light, she thought she might have been carrying a life size dolly.

"Come on, Mary!"

"Darling, hurry!"

The beautiful woman sprinted awkwardly, kicking off her heals, fleeing the rest of the way in gartered stockings and barefoot as the train began to pull away from the platform. She was huffing and puffing keeping in desperate pace with the moving train and Tom's reach. She passed the child to the strong Irishman first, before she took his big hand in hers and was pulled inside the compartment. The pale woman's face was flushed red and sweaty, her eyes wild and wide. She hugged onto Tom for a moment, an old reflex for two old friends. She was suddenly ripped away from his grip by her mother. Both her parents were standing together, coming to their eldest child in a state of relief. Cora framed her daughters face with a look of stressful pride. Together, Robert and Cora took their girl in arm. After just two nights in London, they had all become a closer knit family in the terror of the endless nights in the shelters.

When they broke apart, Lady Mary turned to find the small boy standing amongst the strangers of Noble blood. She didn't hesitate to reach down and pick him up in her arms and hold him to her tightly. The boy reciprocated the loving embrace that the woman gave him. The two melted together like butter on a summer's day.

"You're safe now, George … I've got you, my darling." She whispered clutching the child harder. Her memory was awash with images of the thoughtful, but jolliest little fellow in the village of Downton. But suddenly the boy unsnuggled from the debutante's firm hold.

"But my name is, Tommy!" He protested.

There was something sobered and pained in Mary's eyes as she set the boy down again. She turned away to see her mother staring at her with the saddest of knowing looks. Tom's head was down cast as he leaned against the railing just behind her shoulder. Mary gave a shake of her head to the inquisitive child reassuring him with the fakest of practiced aristocratic smiles.

"Of course it is."

* * *

There was a clock ticking somewhere. Whether it was of the mind, of the heart, or of the soul, there was a clock ticking. To what time it was keeping track of no one person was quite sure. But it was ticking, ticking, and ticking. They could all hear it and to each man it meant something different. The time before they'd go up again, the time they had with two feet on the ground … but for many it was a timer that ticked down till midnight. And when it struck the bell they knew their time would be up. And somewhere amongst the clouds, almost touching heaven, they'd meet their end in fire.

There was a weary silence in the ready room. The only noise came from a cough, a shift of boots on the wooden floor, and the creak of a seat. Too tired to speak, too tired to think, and too tired to feel. A group of men sat in a mishmash of flight gear. Flak vests, uniform jackets, aviator coats, and breathing masks were their clothing. Around them were dented aluminum mugs, dry good cans, and candy bar wrappers. Most of the food was untouched, the tea whiffing a thin plume of steam. Their eyes were alert, their chins stubbled, and their mind buzzing with the roar of plane engines and the loud rattle of cannon. No sleep would come, though they had been told to try and get some.

Too many of them were afraid.

They were afraid they'd lose the edge, the rhythm of the fight up there. But many were afraid that going to sleep would only take them into the skies once more. They'd relive the hazy buzz of Stuka and Messerschmitt engines over head like the cackle of demons all around them. To watch once more the violent trauma of the fiery severing of friendships that happened weeks, days, and hours before hand.

The pilots of the RAF were adrift in a sea of blood with no end in sight.

They were the sons of tenant farmers, dock workers, fishermen, and nobles. Some carried a military pedigree that went all the way back to Wellington. Some were just young men who looked to the sky and wondered what it would be like to touch it. There were noble intentions, mercenary motives, and escapists from a long line of mediocrity. Though, if it was running of some grand ancestral estate, or just rebinding a broken net on a grandfather's fishing boat, all too late they realized how much they longed to of return to the life they had left. No one's courage faltered, the shuckers and cowards had long since fled. Those who were left, the survivors of Dunkirk and veterans of "Eagle Day" knew that there was nowhere to run.

They weren't sure about King and Country, most of them weren't even from England. But they'd all joined up because they knew it was the right thing to do. This land, this Island, was the last bastion of freedom and liberty on the continent. They were eager young volunteers from America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They were refugees from Poland, Austria, and Norway. If they died it would be defending freedom with other like-minded young men who followed that same voice down a lost highway that brought them here, and not with a tyrant's jack boot on their throats.

But after four months they were hanging on by a thread. The air shield thinning by the day, the attrition under the weight of the Nazi avarice was bending the mettle of the RAF. The break throughs and now escalation of bombing not airfields and radar stations but, exclusively, the civilian population was setting the wires on fire with calls for help and air cover that could not be given. It was a threat ever on the mind of the young pilots who began to question if they were even winning the war with each horrific headline in the papers. It had given them a bitter edge and frustration that was tempered by the weariness of the endless fight.

In the quiet there was a rustle of disturbance that no one seemed to notice. A young man, with a shock of red hair, and green eyes, as Irish as Napper Tandy, began searching his person. With each pocket searched there was anger that was boiling over into a rage. The long hours had made the young Irishman punch drunk and edgy. He turned to the youth staring off in the distance next to him. The man was tall, broad, blond, and foreign. His haunted eyes told a story of how he got the gruesome brand of a Star of David on his left cheek. When anyone saw him walk onto the airfield, there was no mistaking why this young foreigner was in the fight against the Nazi's.

"Kristoff … you'd take me'Chocolate?" The Irishman asked.

The Viking looking young man did not respond. His mind elsewhere, on other things, terrible atrocities that none of them knew where happening elsewhere just across the Channel.

"Did you eat me'chocolate?!" There was a dangerous tone in the red haired boy's voice. It was loud enough for the other pilots in the room to finally notice that there was life going on around them. But it was not enough for the blond Adonis.

"You Jew Boy, bastard, you ate me'chocolate!" Suddenly the Irishman leapt across his seat and at the foreigner. His pale hands gripped Kristoff's white scarf and began to twist it in a noose's knot. All at once the other pilots in the room descended on the two struggling figures, trying to pry one another off.

"Hey, that's enough!"

"Save it for the Fritz, McIntyre!"

Finally an older man appeared as three other pilots held the irate Irishman in vice. Major Atticus Aldridge stood in authority against the outburst of frustration and misplaced aggression. His hair was white despite being only in his late-thirties and wrinkles told the story of how this banker somehow held the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"Steady on, McIntyre … what's all this?" He asked calmly.

The pale young man's chest was heaving in white hot anger, a temper that cursed his family and his people. But he had not yet left his senses to talk back to the squadron leader. "Nothing, sir, it's …" There was something suddenly broken in the look of the young man. The anger foaming like the top of a great wave, but as soon as it splashed, it went back out to sea and left nothing in its wake.

"It's nothing, sir." He blinked with a face too tired, too blank, for an explanation.

The Major nodded. "Then let's leave it be, shall we?" He asked rhetorically.

"Yes, sir."

"Go see Leftenant Ludlow about getting yourself another chocolate bar."

"Yes, sir."

"Good man."

Before Atticus moved on, he turned and gave an encouraging pat to Kristoff's large shoulder. He'd forgive the young Irish pilot for his derogatory comment about the foreigner's Jewish heritage. But being Jewish himself, he knew how easy they were blamed for the ills of the world. He felt he owed the young man some sort of reassurance that he would get a fair shake under his command.

As the Major returned to his seat, comforted by a letter from his beautiful wife, and a picture of his children, the rest of the pilots unhanded McIntyre and returned to their own safe spaces. The two pilots, McIntyre and Kristoff, faced one another. But there was no tension, even as the handsome young Viking reached past the Irishman. There, on the little end table, next to the red haired boy's seat, was a nibbled on chocolate bar. He didn't say a word, only handed his wingman the item. Quietly, astonishedly, the youth took the misplaced chocolate bar in hand and looked up at the foreigner. Before he sat down, he gave his friend a pat on the shoulder and left him holding his candy.

For a long moment the young pilot stared at the item in hand. It had been there the entire time, the entire time. He had been so tired he hadn't remembered where he put his own food. There was something funny about it, something ridiculous. He was too tired he couldn't even remember … quietly the Irishman began to laugh at himself. Shocked back into reality the other pilots turned to watch McIntyre.

"It was here the entire time!" he chuckled. "The entire time!" he hooted. But no one cracked a smile as they watched the young man begin to slump.

"It was here and … I didn't see it." There was something painful in his laugh. "I couldn't remember where I put it." His eyes started to mist over. "I couldn't remember …" His laugh faded as tears began to form in his eyes. "I don't remember." He whispered.

The young man slowly sank into a crouch and covered his face with his hands. He couldn't remember what real food tasted like anymore. He couldn't remember what his mother looked like when she smiled, or what it was like to touch the smooth skin of a girl. All that existed in the world was cannon fire, explosions, the frigid cold of the sky, and death, so much death.

Jimmy McIntyre couldn't remember what it was like to live anymore.

As the young man collapsed to the floor, the quiet room filled with ugly sobbing, no one moved. They watched the Irishman crack. It was only a matter of time now and they all felt it. There were too few of them and more than enough hours of the day before a German pilot, straight out of "The Hitler Youth" got his lucky shot. On that day they'd be nothing more than a Roundel painted on the side of a ME 109.

Only one of the pilots got out of his seat, but it wasn't to help the Irishman. The squadron's only triple ace simply passed by the rest of the staring young men, some with tears of their own, and walked into the afternoon.

The summer breeze tussled his unkept head of raven curls, fluttering his navy blue scarf that had seen its better days. He walked out into the open morning with a troubled look in his blue eyes. The energy in the room had been toxic. Being inside there, amongst all the fear, dread, and sorrow of the other men was like being caught in quick sand. He had to get out of there, had to find himself again, before he sank into the vortex's abyss.

He walked out into the grassy plain where the sound of welding and cranking of tools echoed from the crude hanger bays of the airfield. The fighters sat motionless on a runway pocked with twenty millimeter strafes up and down the dirt path. The place had been hit while they were away, not too badly, but enough to give them a reprieve. Their old runway was a shattered mess of asphalt where the dive bombers had broken it all up to hell.

The young man stood in the Northern English air staring at the operations that were going on around the clock. It was the pistons of this war, the underside that no one knew about or read about in the papers. But it was the one thing that all the fighting men relied on. They were the men who made ready these great modern machines of death and hope, aggression and protection. These grand marvels created some forty years ago that were now the sword and shield of liberty that guarded life by taking it.

And George Crawley didn't have the heart to see one more second of it.

Placing his hands in his uniform jacket pockets, he trudged away from the noisy prepping and walked to the other side of the airfields. He stood in the shadow of the brick building that housed the ready and operations rooms. And there he placed his hand against the wall and caught his breath. Something between a sob and a pang of anxiety tore through him as he leaned his head against the cool brick.

No matter how hard he tried, he could not get any distance from the last months. Every day, every hour was one more air battle, one more jerk of the stick, and one more death. It seemed almost hopeless now. They could pile all the plane parts and all the bodies of the Nazi pilots he had killed since Sedan and it would be a marvel to behold. They could put the Captain's seat of a bomber as his throne, give him a German jock stick for a scepter, and a crown of scrap and call him "The King of Death" and somehow Hitler would still come.

It was like crushing worker ants. They were mindless, senseless, and witless zombies to their Fuhrer's greed for world domination. It was if they could not feel anything. How many pilots had he killed? How many friends, brothers, fathers, and it didn't process for them. They just kept coming and every day, that ready room was getting spacious by the hour.

For George It was the hardest thing to shoulder in this endless fight. The idea of someone being there tonight, having a morning laugh, and being gone by the next nightfall. It made making friends a challenge. Some guys clung to one another, absorbing the stories and personalities, it kept them sane. But for George who had elected to stay on after his failure at Dunkirk, he couldn't do it anymore. A month ago he had stupidly allowed himself to have a couple of pints with a medic and a section leader from the 10th squadron. They traded a couple of letters over the last few weeks. However, the word came down the other day that the Lieutenant caught it three times by a passing ME in a fight over Kent. Even shot through the chest he somehow landed the plane. However, when the Medic tried to get him out of the cockpit, there was a gas leak. They were blown away right there on the landing strip. Just before mobilization for the Yorkshire Air Shield, George had received an envelope from the section clerk. The medic, before he died, had mailed him a first edition Jules Verne "Time Machine", knowing their shared love of science fiction books. It arrived exactly on his birthday. It was the hardest gift he ever accepted. After half a year of war, George Crawley was the most experienced pilot in the Squadron.

And he had only been twenty years old for a week.

There weren't too many men left after the last Great War. There was a missing generation between the old men and the young boys who were fighting this one. Christ, no wonder the German's were winning it. When he was in Palestine and Egypt he saw the German expeditions first hand, watching the rank and file of Hitler's Nazi goons. Britain was stagnating, too many old men clutching to the past and too many boys who didn't know any better. Meanwhile the Germans had spent twenty years brooding and foaming to get back at the world. They were building a superior terror out of metals and nightmares out of gunpowder.

George would tell the superior officer, the reporter, and the occasional pretty girl, he wasn't sure why he had joined up. He'd lie and say that he was like the rest of the boys. He somehow convinced himself it was the right thing to do. But the truth was that it was the nightmares that kept him here when any sane man would find a way out of this. It was the same dream that had plagued him every night since Spain. He was standing on a hill top, chasing the Legend of _The Grail of Prague_. He could still hear the German bombers on the dark horizon, see the fire, and hear the screams as they destroyed Guernica and everyone in it. George Crawley saw things that night, things that he could still not comprehend, things that no man could make sense of in the miraculous that came from the onset of the terrible.

In his dreams it was Downton on fire. A village in ruins in the sight of Sybbie and Marigold sitting on the bench in front of the tree on the Abbey's path, surrounded by flame. They turned and held their arms out for him to come into. A pale horse fleeing from the stable engulfed in fire, its burning husk galloping toward him as his mother called him home. When he awoke in a cold sweat he would know why he was kicking that Nazi ant hill, why he'd sit on his throne of death …

In a world in which Hitler and his Third Reich thrived, his family was just one bomb away from sharing the horrible fate of the massacred women and children of Guernica.

Suddenly a gentle hand caressed his hair lovingly. It was slender, delicate, and instantly comforting. It was everything he needed at the moment. He was drawn to the human contact that had been missing for so long. He had taken leave of his senses, sleeplessness and isolation had made him a creature of reaction, of the most basic and primal instincts. And his instinct was to take the pale female hand in his. It was cold, but clean and perfect in every way. He gave her knuckles a kiss as if he were a sailor lost at sea coming to home port and kissing the ground.

When he guided it toward his scruff covered cheek, there was no describing what it felt like. Every moment on death's door with the smell of fuel and blood in the air, one forgets what it was like to be a human, to be flesh and blood. There was no comfort in war, no going home after a hard day's work to a good, clean, fresh girl. No beauty to marvel, no loving hand to caress away the horror of the day. Anything, even just a momentary touch was all any man, any soldier, wanted after endless warfare. For better or for worst someone had given their hand to George Crawley and he'd not waste it on modesty and properness. He rubbed his face hard into the silky palm and shuttered a breath.

There was no protest, no shock, not even stiffness to the owner. She simply took a step forward into his personal space and closed her eyes at the desperate neediness of the affection. This woman, this angel, seemed to have no other motive but to come find George. He wasn't sure how long he had stood there with this young woman's hand, but it wasn't till he felt her face lovingly bury itself into his shoulder from behind that he came back to himself.

Despite George's savage moment, he wasn't all so unaware of who was behind him. He knew the touch, the presence, the feeling of comfort that went soul deep. It was an old feeling, an old love that had always been there inside him. She was all he had left … she was his home. And for a moment as he turned his head, he thought it was her.

But it wasn't.

"Oh Christ … I'm sorry."

The young pilot released the girl's hand quickly and stepped away from their intimate moment in complete embarrassment. Facing her, George had been so sure of who she was. They felt the same, walked the same. They even almost sounded the same. One was more Irish, this one was well-spoken and elegant in every way. The two young women even looked similar. Though, the one that came to mind was always covered in hydraulic fluid that spattered her striking beauty. The woman in front of George was beautiful and there was nothing she could do to hide it.

"It's quite alright, I assure you." There was a sad sweetness in her husky voice.

She was young, beautiful, and elegant. There were curves to her figure that enhanced her youthful appearance. Her blue eyes were soft and kind, kind in a way that seemed so familiar to him. But he felt somewhat self-conscious under their sorrowful gaze. The deep sympathy in her look told him that he wasn't fairing to well in this weary struggle to keep himself alive.

"I, uh, I thought you …" He was distracted by the nurse's uniform she wore. When he preached about the ill equipped and outdated British army for modern warfare, he never thought it even extended as far as the Nursing Corp. The girl looked to be straight out of some twenty-six years back. She had a spotless grey dress and white apron on. Even her long black curls were under a white headscarf.

"Lady Branson?" She finished for him with a slight smile and turn of her head.

He blinked hard. "Yeah, yes … quite." He shook his head with a fluster.

Her grin spread. "You know, you sound quite silly, talking like your _father_ , when you have that American accent." She said lovingly.

George was busy staring at the uniform for so long he hadn't noticed that comment. But to what he thought he heard, it snapped him right back. "What did you say?" He asked with sudden confusion.

"Lady Branson. I am rather mistaken for Lady Sybil quite a lot." She nodded. "And from what I hear, she's mistaken for me quite often as well." It seemed to be a notion that did not bother the young nurse. In fact there was something delighted in her proud smirk.

"I have a hard time believing that." He shared in her infectious smile. "Anybody who knows Sybbie, wouldn't let her touch their paper cut, much less let her be a Nurse." He laughed fondly. "She'd tell a wounded man to rub some dirt on it and then call him a son of a bitch for all of his trouble." They both chuckled.

"She's like her father …" She said with so much love, it could break a grown man's heart.

"I think she's spent too much time with my mother, is the problem." He snorted.

The girl frowned. "It's not the worst thing in the world." There was something of a childlike innocence in the blind faith the beauty had put in the character of Lady Mary Crawley.

To this, George gave a loud chortle. "You don't know my mother." He explained with raised eyebrows.

For a beat she only considered him softly, the warmth coming off her like the first rays of spring after a harsh winter. There was a spark of some sort of inherent love for the girl that came deep within as he watched her. It's the way he used to feel about his grandmother as he sat in her lap while they listened to the gramophone, rocking him back and forth with the beat as she hummed into his hair. It was the way he was tucked into his Aunt Edith side, her arm around him as she read him her articles. It was the warmth in his chest when he used to see his mother waiting for dinner in her finest gown. Her red tinted eyes would glance up at him as he entered the room and the slightest smile coming over her pale face.

After realizing that they had been sharing a deeply intimate moment, he cleared his throat awkwardly. "Can I help you, Nurse …?" he trailed off waiting for her to give him her name.

"No, actually, that's why I'm here." There was something coy in her warm husky voice. For the first time he noticed the steaming tin mug in her hand. "You look like you need this." She offered it to him.

He seemed suspicious for a moment, but then felt ashamed of the cynical feeling in the actions of the warm young woman. "I have to warn you, I'm not much for tea." He said with apprehension at the item in her hand.

The girl opened her mouth in playful shock. "Steady on, Captain Crawley … that's sedition!" She chastised. "You could be thrown out of this here man's army for saying things like that." She placed a hand on her heart.

"You promise?" He asked tiredly.

She glared, looking one way, then the other, before leaning in. "Your secret is safe with me." She whispered with a nod. Once again she offered him the cup.

With a weary look, he took the mug from her carefully. But, after taking it, she placed her cool hands over his and smiled. His head swam with such relief at her touch. When he looked up into matching blue eyes, he felt and looked like an old man as the stress fell away, and in his moment of relief, he knew just how hard the cost of this war was taxing him.

She pushed the mug toward his face gently, like a mother encouraging her child. He gave her a cynical frown but took a whiff of the steaming liquid. Like ignited rocket fuel, the pilot's mind went from cobwebs to overdrive in an explosion that went through all five of his senses.

"Wow …" he coughed. "Is that what I think it is?" he asked in awe.

The Nurse nodded fondly. She once again pushed the mug toward his nose, lightly blowing the vapors on his face. He looked up at her with a near tear in his eye as the smell of freshly brewed coffee washed over him.

"Nurse … I could kiss you right now." He admitted as he savored the intoxicating smell of artificial life right at his fingertips.

The girl placed her hands behind her back. Her smile was made from the purest sugarcane. There was a look on her face that said that she was rather pleased with herself as the man took his first sip of coffee in several months. She tilted her head with a smirk watching him struggle down the first swallow. He gave his head a violent shake and squinched his eyes shut for a long moment. But when he opened them he seemed like a new man.

A giggle escaped her lips as he sighed contently and looked down at the coffee. "Where did you get this? This isn't the slush that they ration out, this is real … this is real coffee." For a second it seemed that he might cry. But when George looked up at her again, she seemed very happy that he was happy.

And in the summer sunlight, she looked like an angel.

With a soft snort with a mouth full of coffee he reached over and offered her the mug in camaraderie. She seemed surprised at the gesture. He motioned his head to it kindly. "Go on, beautiful … have a swig." He baited playfully.

"Oh …" she turned her nose up at it. "I'm not much for coffee." She exclaimed with a shake of her head.

"Bullshit, You're gonna need something with an edge if you're gonna work around here. Or at least something rather than the three gallons of Earl Gray a day you people drink." He motioned his head to the mug again. "Come'on." He pushed.

She seemed taken aback. For a moment the girl looked as if the curse word uttered in front of her was some great sin that would get both of them in trouble if someone heard it aloud. But she seemed just as adverse to the mug in front of her. "I have a confession …" She replied hesitantly looking up at him. "I've never had real coffee before." She admitted.

The worn down pilot gave her a weary smile. "First time for everything." He didn't budge.

She bit her lip, her azure eyes going back and forth between the steaming liquid and the young man. Finally she relented and took the mug. She gave a deep breath and took ahold of George's forearm for support. Then, she gave a squeal of nerves before she took a sip of it.

The pilot let out his first honest-to-god laugh in four months as the girl's beautiful face twisted as if she was in pain. When he took the mug from her, the nurse stomped away, shaking her hands. When she returned, the girl grabbed George by the lapels and buried her face in his chest and squealed. He snickered through another long draft as she panted.

"By god, that could bring the dead to life!" She exclaimed, breaking away from him and placing her hands on her hips and smacking her lips with an eye twitching.

To her observation he nodded. "Yep, this is definitely what they use to lubricate the fighter engines." He admitted with a gestural grunt.

"But it does have certain …" She searched for a proper lady like word in her vernacular.

"Kick?" He asked with a gulp.

Then, with a knowing smile, he offered her the mug again. She gave him a grudging look of pure love before shamefully submitting. She huddled close to him and took it without a word.

"Yes, a kick." She agreed taking another ladylike sip. As the bitter flavor burst George watched the girl's eye twitch close as she made a retching sound. "Ugh, it gets worst …" She handed it back to him.

"You get used to it." He chuckled taking another sip himself.

It was just a simple cup of coffee, but it was the closest George had felt to being himself in months, if not years. Suddenly the girl took his hand and when he met her gaze there was something reassuring and comforting about the way her blue eyes were looking through him. It suddenly occurred to him that the two had been talking, touching, and laughing as if they had known each other. Not over weeks, months, or even years. It felt as if the nurse, the girl, was someone he had known his entire life. It was as if she had always been there, had always been by his side. Through every smile, tear, victory, and tragedy, through every adventure on four continents, there was something familiar, something inherent in her touch that went back to his earliest memories.

Somehow George Crawley knew this girl who could've been his twin. He had known her his entire life.

The utopia of the 'should be' and 'never was' that they had carved out for themselves was rudely interrupted by a high pitched wailing that screeched throughout the airfield. George's heart sank as the alarm sounded for an incoming German assault in their sector. He gave a long sigh and handed the nurse back the mug. He took a moment of gratitude cupping her cheek with his hand with deep familiarity. There was something terribly tragic in the way she looked as she pressed her cheek into his palm as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Thanks for the coffee." There was never a more sincere thank you in the world.

"Always." She smiled softly.

Turing to leave, he let his hand slide down her arm. But when in preparation to run toward the planes, her hand caught his wrist. There was a quick flicker of surprise when the nurse pulled him back. He would've asked what was it that she needed, but instead he felt her throw her arms around his neck. Before he knew it, he was enveloping her in a deep and hard hug that made him light headed. For just one second of pure heaven, he allowed himself to get lost in her embrace, to let the primal love wash over him.

He didn't know that standing there, in the summer sun, in her arms, he was living in a moment of a past that could've been. The lifetime's worth of love in her eyes and touch in their interaction could've been a part of a little boy's life. A young woman who didn't believe in the boundaries of the highest class she was born into, unafraid to show love in the ways she thought it should to be given. She could've been the one person who would've have taken a lonely young child, wandering an impoverished content captured in the throes of Depression, in as her own. She could've been a constant that would've been there for him beyond extreme emergencies that brought Edith to some of the most dangerous places in America for a titled British Lady. Along with the love of her life and a daughter who was his best friend, this girl's endless love could've made him feel that he was a part of his own family not an exiled outsider.

Sadly, it was a future and a past that was erased from the stars before he was ever born.

" _Protect the train …"_ She whispered in his ear.

He leaned his head back in a confused frown, waiting for an explanation. But it never came. She only gave him a kiss on the corner of his mouth with all the emotion of someone who truly loved him before she climbed down off her tippy-toes. He held her by her hips, watching, the words seemed seared on his mind as he watched her a moment longer. Then he turned to leave, giving her a nod in assurance that he heard what she had said.

"You'll be here when I get back?" He asked confidently. There was something in his self-assured attitude that made the nurse smile.

"It'll be as if I never left you."

He returned the young woman's smile and turned to sprint toward the chaos of mechanics and pilots scrambling to their fighters. The wind gusted hard in his face as he raced forward. But he had gone several paces before he stopped and turned around back to the spot they had been standing.

"I never got that … name …"

As the wind died down, George Crawley frowned in confusion. His eyes darted around the shadowed nook. The grass fluttered and rolled in the afternoon breeze, the brick was as cool and maroon as it ever had been.

But no one was there.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

The Minstrel Boy – Jacqueline Schwab


	3. Leaves from the Vine - Part I

**Leaves from the Vine – Part I**

 _On a windless afternoon, there was a certain magic to the snowflakes that floated from the heavy black clouds above. The white flakes were so casual, so leisurely in their decent that they seemed to almost float in suspended animation. The country side dusted in pockets of white, the tree creaking and cracking under the growing weight of accumulation. The moisture in the air whispered that winter would soon be coming properly. Some of the old farmers would say that it would be a hard one. Feel it in the snap of their joints, in the ache of their old war wounds. But the young boy looking out the window often found that it meant different things for different people._

 _George Crawley had always enjoyed winter, the cold, the snow. It was snowball fights, snowmen, snow forts, and hot chocolate when it was all said and done. Winter brought Christmas, which brought lights, decorations, and trees. The presents were great, but it was everything around it that the boy had really liked. His excitement had been rekindled upon his first scouting trip for the Christmas tree. Mr. Barrow said that he would be the one to pick it this year. It seemed like a big task, so he had asked his grandfather to borrow a book on trees. And for most of the day he had spent it in the library flipping pages and frowning studiously at the pictures and the words he didn't understand or could read. Every once in a while his granny would look up from needle point and chortle under her breath. He asked her not to make light of the situation, tried to make her understand the momentous task that Thomas had placed upon him. She nodded seriously and agreed, allowing him to look at the big book without comment, though he did notice that she was still smiling at him over his shoulder as he worked._

 _But sometime after he had quelled his granny, the baby started crying which had called her away. George was all the way down stairs, in the library, and he could still hear her. She was a loud one, that one. That's what Mrs. Hughes had said about his baby sister, Cora. And he had noticed that she was a yeller. She hadn't allowed anyone to get sleep when she was awake, and she was always hungry. He had offered to donate some of his saving money to buy the baby a few loafs of bread to keep in the nursery. But, his step-father Henry told him that it wasn't exactly how it worked. It had changed George's world and messed up the rest of his day._

 _Since then he had postulated over his book what exactly babies ate._

 _His solution was to go ask his Donk if he might borrow another book, this on how babies were made. The staunch man nearly choked on his tea. At first he had replied that George was already borrowing a book. Removing the volume under his arm, the boy offered it to the man in exchange for answers. Cornered and with no help, he simply, uncomfortably, told him that it would be best to take his quest for knowledge downstairs and see if anyone needed help. When pushed about this book on baby making, his grandfather told him that there was a two day holding policy on checked out books. Robert Crawley explaining as difficultly as possible, with great discomfort, that it would be "Bad for Business" if people just checked out books for a couple of hours and returned them. George had watched him start to scribble his name on post that didn't need signatures, saying apologetically that he didn't make the rules._

 _Since then he had been sitting at the servant's table with his book on trees. His doe blue eyes looking out the window at the frosted countryside. He sometimes found it astounding all the things he didn't know about the world. It seemed to overwhelm him sometimes. He was often told that this place would someday be his, and it frightened him. Some would say that he was too young for these type of thoughts, but it did scare him to think that he might never be as smart as his mother or his Aunt Edith. So he couldn't help but ponder the question of what if he let everyone down? What if out of all the years of his family living in this house, he was the one who would lose it? It depressed him sometimes and he would've liked to ask his mother about it, or even just talk to her about it. But with the baby, it didn't seem like she had much time for George. He didn't mind, it seemed understandable, Cora being such a tiny thing. Life did seem simple when you were taking care of the baby. But it did leave the boy with a nagging fear of the future, when someday everyone would look to him for answers._

 _His musing was interrupted by the kitchen maid who arrived to clear away the servant's tea. Daisy seemed harried as usual, in fact, George had begun to ponder if the girl in pink skirts was born harried. She often looked anxious and afraid of her own shadow. Every day, Mrs. Patmore was screaming at her to get a move on. He didn't envy her, but, at the same time, she always seemed rather nice._

" _Daisy?" He looked up from a large tropical tree._

 _The girl focused her dark eyes on the small boy hunched over a book nearly bigger than him. "Wha is'it?" She answered breathlessly continuing to clear the table away._

 _There was certain casualness between the staff and George that there hadn't been for any of the Crawley girls. He had spent much of his time with them, rather than with anyone else. So it was that despite Mr. Carson's disapproval of the young master spending so much time downstairs, many of the staff luminaries didn't bat an eye to the young man sitting in some quiet space in the sitting room and dining area looking at books or drawing. They had all taken their turn watching over him since the nannies had all fled amongst the strong rumors from the foreign office of a substantial_ _ **'Turkish Bounty'**_ on young Master George's head _._

" _Did you know that babies don't eat like the rest of us?"_

 _The girl looked up and blinked at the small child. "Wha?" She frowned in shock._

" _They don't eat the same food we do." He explained to the kindred soul._

 _To this Daisy gave a giggle and sighed. "You had me worried for a moment, ya'know?" She scoffed clattering plates into a bin. "Oh course they don't eat the same as we du." She chastised._

 _George frowned. "Why?" he asked. If there was anyone in the world who was going to finally answer him it was going to be Daisy._

" _Cause they don't got no teeth, silly." She explained._

 _Immediately the boy reached into his mouth and pulled on his own teeth. It was another amazing discovery of the day. One that was only deepening the mystery of who and what exactly were these baby creatures, where they came from, and why were they so poorly made?_

" _Babies are born without teeth?" He asked in shock._

" _Of course they are."_

" _Why?" He asked with a hard frown._

 _Daisy giggled for only a second and was about to answer her future employer when she stopped. Her eyes darted back and forth. Before they knew it, the Kitchen Maid was scrunching her apron and looking up to the ceiling in thought._

" _Well …" She trailed off. When she looked back down, the boy was waiting for her to answer. The problem was that it was a question that she had never thought of either._

" _I don't know." She frowned as she slowly walked away from the table with the dirty dish bin. As she departed George knew that another person's day had been ruined thinking of these important questions that no one in the universe might ever know._

 _Passing Daisy on her way out of the kitchen, Anna Bates held keys in her hand. She gave the clearly confused and somewhat troubled girl a double take as she passed her in the threshold. With a shake of her head she glanced where she was coming from to find George sitting at the end of the table hunched over the big book. Sometimes Daisy was a mystery, but what, little, Anna did know about her, she knew that whatever intellectual quandary that was troubling her, George was most likely the one who posed it to her._

" _Good afternoon, Master George."_

" _Hey Anna."_

 _She took a seat across from him and watched the boy for a moment. She had just been getting back into the rhythm of work again after having her baby. It was hard to part with John Jr., but she knew that it had to be done. But there was something to having George here that was both a blessing and a curse. Seeing the small boy had made her miss her own child more when she was away from him, but being around the boy made it all feel normal. It made her feel that her maternal instincts weren't gaining rust or that they wouldn't drive her mad in a house filled with ringing bells of grown adults. It was a mercy that all these strong feelings had a place to go. When she caught George's eye there was love in their traded smirks._

" _Anna …" George frowned._

" _Uh-huh." She acknowledged slyly._

" _Did you know that baby's don't eat the same things we do?" he asked._

 _To this the blond maid smirked. "It would be easier on us mothers if they did, wouldn't it?" She asked rhetorically. All hours of the night, Anna would get out of bed and pull a nipple out to be suckled. Her long days were turning into longer nights._

" _Did you know that babies aren't born with teeth?" He continued._

" _I did …" She nodded._

" _Strange isn't it?" He asked with all the innocent frustration of a young life in his scrunched frown._

 _Anna snickered fondly. George was all Lady Sybil in terms of having the Levinson look, but when he had that expression on his face like that … there was no denying that he was Matthew Crawley's boy._

" _Do you know how babies are made?" He asked suddenly._

 _Caught by surprise, the Lady's Maid shook her head and stood somewhere between outrage and the inexcusable compulsion to laugh till her belly cramped._

" _Why would you ask that?" She asked with some shock in a controlled voice._

 _The boy frowned thoughtfully. "Well …" he sighed. His serious expression made her bite her lip to hide the grin that nearly came to her pretty face. "I thought that if I found out how babies were made, I might find out why they arrive so incomplete and weird." He sighed again with a troubled mind._

" _Very scientific …" She nodded in understanding, finding that she was more akin to laugh than to be worried._

" _I asked Donk about it." He continued._

 _To the admission, Anna's eyebrows hit her hairline. "You asked his Lordship where babies come from?" She parroted in outright shock._

 _The boy's blue eyes shot to the Lady's Maid, suddenly frightened. George was suddenly aware that he might have done something wrong. "Well … I couldn't borrow a book on the subject, because of the two day holding policy, you understand?"_

" _Obviously …"_

" _Right, so I thought it would be faster if he just told me about it." He tried to explain the best he could about his reasoning._

 _Mrs. Bates did everything she could to not grab the boy across from her and squeeze him with her love. She could only imagine the look on his Lordship's face when confronted with the question that no English Gentlemen would ever want posed to them. Anna wasn't even sure where the Crawley girls found out about intimacy in the first place. She was ashamed to admit that when she heard that Lady Edith had given birth, she was very surprised, as she had been convinced that Lady Edith wouldn't exactly know … what to do with it, or where to put it, so to speak._

" _What did his lordship say?" She asked on the verge of cracking._

" _He said to come down here …" He shrugged._

 _Letting out a loud laugh, the woman ran her hand through his curls. "Probably for the best." She could only imagine that not only had George ruined his Lordships day, but the poor boy would be subjected to a round of strange and evasive questioning from Lady Grantham, Lady Mary, and most likely Mr. Talbot before it was all said and done._

 _That was if they remembered that George existed._

 _Anna was not a stranger to being the middle child in a large family, nor the attention that babies needed. John Jr. was not the first baby that she had taken care of, brothers, sisters, even George in his infancy when Nanny West was sacked by Lady Grantham herself. But there was a balance that every good mother had to find between her responsibility to the baby and the first born, and Anna was sad to admit that Lady Mary was not made of natural motherhood. It was exasperated by this horrible and terrifying rumor of a price on Master George's head that frightened every nanny away from Downton. Thus, it was the insistence of such horrible tidings that Henry and Mary doing everything for little Cora. But in doing so, it had left George behind to be cared for by the staff. Rather than taking on the burden herself, Anna knew that Lady Mary instead found comfort in that she didn't have to check on George, knowing that he was being watched over. It was an aristocratic trait that Anna knew that those in the middle and lower classes did not share. And with Marigold and Miss Sybbie away, it was often that they found George downstairs with a book or a drawing pad, his education coming from maids and footmen, rather than a noble family who was too enamored with a new baby._

 _Anna did not doubt Lady Mary or the Crawley's love for George, nor did she question their devotion toward the boy. But there was something troubling about the fact that he was asking question with no one to answer, and the fact that the boy was looking for Christmas Trees in a dusty volume of "South African Vegetation" from the library. An old book bought by an unfathomably young Lady Grantham during the Boer War as a way to somehow be closer to her husband while he was away. She knew that it was given to him for no other reason but to give the boy something to do, to keep him occupied so he wouldn't notice that no one was there when he'd look up. If Anna could have a say in such things, she'd warn Lady Mary that this behavior had to be curbed before he was old enough to understand what was happening._

 _As the boy flip through the page, smiling softly at a funny looking tree, there was something sad in the way Anna watched him. She couldn't shake this feeling that something bad was on the horizon. It might have been her imagination, or new and strong maternal senses tearing through her. But she felt a strong a pull to protect the boy who had an air of loneliness to him, even if he didn't realize it himself._

" _Your Uncle Tom was saying Miss Sybbie is growing fast."_

" _She's still bigger than me."_

" _You'll catch up … but in the meantime, her Ladyship has asked me to go down and look through some of Lady Sybil's old clothing and see if I might find some things that might fit Miss Sybbie, a blouse, a skirt … I was wondering if you'd like to help?" She asked._

 _The boy glanced up. "Alright …" He nodded._

 _There was something intriguing about his Lady Aunt who he had never met or even had a chance to know. The boy had always loved a good mystery, and Lady Sybil Crawley might have been the biggest of them. It wasn't only by the amazing things that he heard by those who had loved her most, but it was the often mistake that people made in assuming that George and Sybbie were twins or at least siblings. This young woman, just like his father, was a ghost that haunted his shadow. One part Matthew, One part Sybil, he was a perfect melding of everything that was missing from a fractured family, everything taken from them. Sometimes Lady Mary had to take a moment to settle herself after glancing at her own child. Other times she would be desperate to look out the window and watch George and Sybbie at play just to pretend for a wish in the beat of a broken heart..._

 _That she had both of them back again._

* * *

On a bright sunny day there was an endless ocean of blue in the sky above. The shapeless white forms floating overhead were thin and wispy, more of a concept, an unformed fluff of stretched cotton, than actual clouds. On days like these, in normal times, one might consider a country stroll, a picnic, or even a drive into the summer air with the one that makes you the happiest. By any standards held by the county of Yorkshire, today was a perfect day. It was idealistic for any conceivable notion for an activity of lounging, adventuring, and grand romance. But in the last four months, days like today were dreaded. Visibility from the sky was hundred percent, the summer sun exposing every building, every radar, and spotter station that could not be hidden by the thin shadows or green canopies. On days like today its beauty was a curse to a harried country, and the bloody battlefield to its beleaguered guardians.

The sound of wailing echoed loudly over head as a man in a blue uniform and cap cranked the alarm. From the moment Fighter Control told him to sound it, there had been nothing but chaos. Mechanics, Pilots, and Ground Crew running across the rolling green grass of the airfield trying to get to their fighters, get ready and prep for take-off from the dirt track runway. The pilots like boxers, taking a swig of water, cleaning the cuts on their brows and when they got to where they were going it would be another pound of the bell, another round in the ring with Herman Goering and his Nazi Luftwaffe.

You could tell who the boxers were. The RAF pilot was a creature living off an hour of sleep, hot water flavored like tea, and the biscuits a dead pilot's mother had sent two weeks ago through the post. He was unshaven, though there was not a beard amongst them. They had come to this war as boys, given flight gear by the Royal Army, and were now called men from that day forward. Their corner men were the mechanics. They were a scruffy, short tempered, cranky, and worn down sort in uniform and jumpsuits. They smelled of oil and covered in the muck of modern machinery. Their work was tireless and endless. Each sortie brought home problems, if there was anything that did come home. Then, there was a quiet guilt in the curses of the work, and the forgetfulness of the men who sat in the cockpits and flew the planes. It was hard to remember in the mad rush that there were more than just pistons and rotary machination, but a man of flesh and blood who relied on their tinkering. And when the mechanic had less work to do, it meant that their work didn't save a man's life. It was a helpless and heart breaking job. It was a vicious cycle of frustration, regret, and sorrow in a hell of cranking tools, welding torches, and the smell of oil.

In the mad scramble of bodies and the roar of cranking plane engines, a young man slipped and pushed his way toward an idle olive drab fighter with a red, white, and blue roundel on each wing. Its paint was chipped and there were obvious welded patches where stray shells had slammed against it in vein. Under the cockpit were three rows of tiny German crosses, under rows of Nazi swastikas. Amongst these three rows of kills, counting amongst twenty was the highest for any RAF pilot. By mid-1940, George Crawley was one of last remaining triple aces on the isle of Britain. Atticus had warned the young pilot that the trophy markings would put a target on him during the fight, but George only replied that they had already put four targets on his fighter when they pained the roundel logo on it.

"Where in the hell have you been?!"

A voice shouted over the sound of buzzing motors and alarm all around them. The mechanic that rushed toward him was by default the normal temperament of a hot blooded Grease Monkey, who was born tired of what they perceived as a pilot's ungrateful and demanding behavior. But there was nothing default about the lithe young woman in a stained half unbuttoned blouse, uniformed pencil skirt, and all covered by a, too big, double breasted, leather pea coat. "The Star of the County Grantham, Lady Sybil 'Sybbie' Branson's raven curls were pinned back in a messy bun, her milky cheek marred by hydraulic fluid. In one hand she carried a parachute pack and in the other she had a yellow flack vest.

From the first sight of her, George was immediately reminded of the nurse. It only occurred to him now just how much they actually did look alike. There were differences. Sybbie was slender, like his mother. Her face was the spitting image of their Granny when she was a young American Heiress. In fact they had both been mistaken countless times as being the children born to the Countess in her mature years. But in a dark room or from a distance George might not have been able to tell Sybbie and the nurse apart.

"There was a nurse …" George met her at the front of "their" fighter.

"Let's just leave it at that." The young woman held up her hand as she dropped his flight gear in the grass.

"It wasn't like … oh for love of …" George rolled his eyes at his cousin's insinuation. "Switch!" He ordered.

Together George and Sybbie shed jacket and coat and traded. Sybbie slipped on George's uniform jacket comfortably, while George donned his old, sand blasted, coat whose beaten leather was starting to crack on the shoulders. Sybil had a uniform when she arrived. But now, as was the case for most of their lives, she shared with George rather than keep track of her own things.

"What in the …" George sniffed his shoulder with a glare. "Did you put perfume on my jacket?!" he shouted at her over the chaos.

Sybbie rolled her eyes. "It's been a year since Alexandretta, and it still smells like a camel! I'm sorry, but something had to be done!" She argued back fixing his scarf.

"Oh, that's great, that's really great, Sybbie. When I get shot down, I can explain that to the farmer who finds me. Or you know I'll be dead, and that prick, Richard Carlisle, will print my death in the front page of his newspaper with the added antidote. "RAF ace, George Crawley, shot down in Yorkshire sortie wearing his mother's perfume. End quote!" He snapped as he buttoned up his coat.

Sybbie smirked grudgingly. "Are you crazy?" She snorted. "You think Mama would loan me her perfume?" She asked in playful shock. "That was a gift from Aunt Rose." She nodded. "Just wanted to see how it smelled." She picked up his flack vest and handed it to him.

"First, that woman is **not** our Aunt … she's barely our peer. Second, you mean to tell me that you hadn't even worn it before you decided to dump it on my coat?!" He asked indignantly as he lifted the yellow vest overhead.

"Honestly darling …" George frowned in a lack of amusement as Sybbie did her best Lady Mary impersonation. "If it gets smashing reviews in your obitchaury, then obviously I'm gonna wear it." She finished with a haughty turn up of her nose.

"Well at least it'll be pleasant surprise for the boys down at the morgue anyway …" He glared.

"I'll be sure to ask them to send a glowing letter to Aunt Rose."

For the many years that Tom Branson had run a successful auto business in Downton, Ripon, and London. He had offered warrantee on all his cars which meant he had opened his own auto shop some years back. It was a dream of his partner, Henry Talbot, before his death. In Tom's own dreams he thought he'd have a highly educated, highly refined, and highly political daughter whose beauty was on par with her nursing skills. He never thought he'd have a Beautiful daughter, who didn't care for politics, who knew more about engines than just about anyone in Yorkshire, and who spent her time earning spending money in drinking contests. When Tom and Lady Mary were informed that Sybbie had been expelled from school, Tom had been happy that it was for political reasons. His wish, however, was that of one that was granted by a trickster genie. When they arrived they learned that Sybbie's involvement in politics was limited to knocking her socialist professor out cold in a fight at local campus pub. Tom Branson's worry only intensified when after her presentation to court, on the night of her debutante ball, the social event of the '38 season, she ran off. For over a year they had barely heard a word before she returned. And with her came a courtesan's belly dancer outfit, an air racing championship cup, and a Nazi regimental eagle taken from an SS standard, clearly captured as a trophy from a battlefield. They were items whose origin Sybbie would "rather not say" in how she got them.

But they all knew that George Crawley had something to do with it.

Sybbie had not only kept in contact, complaining endlessly about his stupid life choices and delusions of grandeur, but had ran out on a first dance as a titled lady with the King of England himself not to Paris or Rome but to Palestine and North Africa, to George, sharing in his adventures. Most were more dangerous than Sybbie would ever admit to anyone at home. The two, who were near inseparable in the nursery, had never strayed from one another in George's many years away. They had both shared in missing parents, Sybbie looking to her Mary as her mother in every way. And, while George butted heads with his Uncle Tom, he always knew that the man only had his best interests in mind. Sybbie and George had practically come in a set, with only Marigold missing, and the war hadn't changed that sentiment by the slightest.

Though her father had tried to keep her away, Sybbie was a natural with tools in her hand and a machine to fix. In a few short years she had a vast knowledge of two generations of automobiles than most, and she had the degrees from many great British Intuitions to prove it. The 'Girl Genius' had left her father no choice, but to hire her on. When the war broke out in France, Sybbie joined the Ministry of Aircraft Production. As a civilian mechanic, she learned very quickly about plane engines, which weren't so dissimilar to the automotive. But when she heard that George had joined up with the RAF and saw action in Dunkirk, Sybbie volunteered to join up with "Rogue Group" of the 11th Squadron, with help from Atticus Aldridge. Though there was some push back in allowing a beautiful young woman amongst "The Chaps" there was a stronger need for experienced mechanics.

Since then she had worked exclusively for George and no one else. They shared meals, drinks, laughs, tears, and a cot at night. She was more than just a bit of sanity, something that was familiar in the long nights with death's phantom clamor in his mind and heart. Sybbie was a reminder of who he was, least the idea of him being nothing but a killing machine, a weapon, took over his very soul. After his exile, Sybbie was all he had left …

She was his only home now.

The raven haired girl helped him with the straps of his flack vest, when she looked over his shoulder and glared. "Charlie Bryant … eleven o'clock high." She sighed in exasperation.

"Just what I needed right now." He grumbled irritably.

When George turned he saw a stiff backed and lipped man pacing toward them. He was only a few years George and Sybbie's senior, but he had an air of being much older. They noticed that he was in full flight gear, and something told George that it was because he hadn't taken it off. Charles had his mother Ethel's auburn hair and dark eyes, but his father's mustache and look, and all of his grandfather's pleasantness.

Charles Parks Bryant was best explained by George Crawley as one of those Prim British officers who were the proper bastards during the Great War. He was the kind of cruel son of bitch who would bleed his entire command in pointless assaults just to save face and honor in the slaughter for the integrity of the Regiment. Both young men were Captains. But unlike George who was still flying in second command to Atticus, Charles was in command of "Lion Group" due to his commander being shot down over the Cliffs of Dover, two weeks ago. Being "Lion Leader" gave the man the incorrect idea that it gave him the power of outranking him in the sky and on the ground.

"What is it Arsehole day?" Sybbie growled as she helped him secure his vest.

"Don't know, maybe there's a festival in town …" George muttered. "Yes, Dear?!" George mocked the cold man who walked right up to pilot and mechanic with a sarcastically pleasant tone.

"Where have you been, Crawley?!" He snapped at him immediately. "And why aren't you in your flight gear?" His dark eyes were cold and his voice was filled with superiority. George and Sybbie traded annoyed looks before they lazily turned back to the man.

"Sorry, Charlie Boy, but I was on the phone with your mother, hoping I could try and talk her out of retirement … if you know what I mean?" Both George and Sybbie proceeded, with matching looks of irritation, to make a masturbation motion with their fists in perfect unison.

The red that touched the cheeks of the British Officer matched his hair and mustache. There was something to be said about the soul tearing jab of the rapier wit of Lady Mary Crawley, and the scalpel she wielded against her enemies insecurities. It was a terrible gift that she had passed down to her only child. Now it was a weapon that was used to its full devastating effect against Charles Bryant.

There was a hatred that ran deeper for the children of the Crawley sisters than just professional rivalry for Charles Parks Bryant. Since he was fourteen years old he was haunted by the knowledge that he was the bastard son of a simple house maid. It was only made worst in the afterwards when he learned that his mother was a prostitute, servicing men in sight of his very crib. His response was to become the most proper, of proper gentlemen. Meanwhile, he would, forever, hold a grudge against the occupants of Downton Abbey who had cast his mother out to a life of filth that clung to his future and reputation like a kitchen wash cloth. His hatred only intensified when he was rejected from a great and prestigious school based on the knowledge of his parentage. Some years later he was given a spot there, to which he took advantage of much to his great misfortune. He quickly became the subject of mockery from the other boys as he was several years their senior and thus thought to be a simpleton. And he had no one other to blame than George Crawley, who had scoffed at the place in the prestigious school to chase dreams and ancient treasure in Spain and North Africa. In his free spot opening up, Charles was forever tormented.

Charles Bryant tried so hard to be the picture perfect English Gentlemen in order to separate himself from the brash and Americanized, son of a country solicitor and the hauntingly beautiful, titled, presented, and yet, wholly unrefined daughter of a chauffeur. Both whose fathers were no greater than his own mother, and yet because they had weaseled their way into the beautiful and noble Crawley sisters' bedrooms, their children were given everything that Charles worked so hard for. Even in war, though Charles's education had earned him Officer's stripes, George Crawley, who spited that same education, still made Captain as well as being one of the heroes of Eagle Day. He was even given special treatments by having a female mechanic on station with him, even sharing quarter. The only thing that Charles could cling to, that he had over both George and Lady Sybil was that he had his own command.

And he'd be damned if he'd let either of the Downton brats forget it.

"That's quite enough of that!"

Atticus Aldridge jogged up just in time to see the outrage on Charles's face and the annoyance of his wife's relation. The white haired man with a modern, fur lined, waist coat looked to be tired beyond any measure that a mortal man could be. In the presence of the Major, Charles went cold and expressionless immediately saluting. It was appreciated by the native Englishman in sight of his nephew's dirty look shot toward the other captain.

"What's the word, Atticus?!"

By the third week of "The Blitz" George Crawley had dispensed with formality and regulation. In the years that Atticus had known the son of Lady Mary, he knew George to be very familiar with people, especially with people he known for some time. It was his thumb of the nose to the upbringing that his mother and grandfather had hoped to groom. But years of living with him in New York City had made Atticus used to it. Though there was still his father's Englishman inside him that felt it all very inappropriate even in the face of death.

"There's a large bomber group out of Scandinavia, most of the 11th is going after the main bomber wing headed for Leeds. But there's a smaller war party that's broken off from the main group, Fighter Control thinks they're going after the factory in Ripon."

George felt Sybbie immediately grab his arm out of some fear or for comfort the moment she heard. Since she was old enough to walk, Sybil had gone with her father and their Mama to Ripon to see the factory. Then, they had made car engines, and in the years before the war, Sybbie had often went there for special parts for the cars in her father and Mama's dealerships. And while she was there, they had implored to the girl's mechanical genius to help around there. In that time she had become close friends with many of the workers. To attack the plant, now streamlining airplane engines, was like an attack on Sybbie's friends and the many happy memories she had.

"How many?" George asked.

"Radar couldn't confirm. They're flying too close together. We've been assigned to go after them, along with Captain Bryant and a contingent of "Lion Group's" fighters. We do know that it's enough of them to level the entire town." Atticus explained.

"It'll be the last mistake they ever make." George stated with a swaggering arrogance. With Sybbie's help he began slipping on his parachute pack and was busy strapping it on, moving toward his fighter when a hand caught his arm.

"George …" Atticus cleared his throat. There was something strange and resign in the way the older man was looking at him. "I think it'll be best if you keep your distance from me today." He said seriously.

There was something youthful, cocky, and naïve in the smirk of the young man. "Come'on Atticus." He gave a tap to his "Uncle's" shoulder confidently. But it didn't crack the man's serious demeanor.

"If one those 109s gets behind us at the right moment, while you're covering my wing, it could be a hard day for Rose. Please, do her a favor and just … look out for yourself today. It would surely break her heart to lose me, but she'd survive. But she couldn't bear it if _they_ lost you today … and it would be the end of her if she lost both of us in one go." The Major said almost sadly.

Since he closed his eyes last night he had dreamt of nothing but memories of New York. His wife's smile, his two children clinging to his legs, and the warm hearth that he'd sit in front of while reading to the two children lying on the rug at his feet. He remembered their warm smiles, curled up to their mother as all three of them listened intently. He could remember the quiet satisfaction of the stillness of their love. Whenever he saw George, he remembered those desperate years in the early days of Depression, when they all relied on one another to make it in a foreign city. They were the hardest and yet the best times that Atticus ever had. He could almost touch it those memories; touch them. With each tick of the clock that counted down till the midnight chimes.

George searched the man's eyes. "Sure." He agreed.

The Major placed his leather flight helmet on his head and began to jog away.

"Hey, Atticus …"

"George?"

"Next time, if you're gonna tell me this … work on your timing, huh?!"

The man gave a grimly apologetic smile with a nod. George was quiet a moment, watching his relative and commanding officer disappear. It seemed like an odd thing to say, but then, it had been an odd day. His mind strayed to the nurse for a moment.

"What is it?!" Sybbie asked, her voice taking a gentler tone.

"I dunno …" He trailed off. "It's just, in all the years we lived together and known each other … he's never said that to me before!" he turned to look at his cousin. They both watched where Atticus had folded in with the chaos. Once again there was a pause.

"That's encouraging …" Sybbie said absently. "Maybe it's the perfume." She shrugged.

Her cousin rolled over her comment. "Shit!" George snapped with a shake of his head. He suddenly felt like someone had put a hex on this day.

In their scramble they had almost forgotten Charles Bryant. He stepped forward with all the authority he could muster. Both Mechanic and Pilot looked up with an air of two people who were far from taking him seriously. He stood straight and put his hands behind his back.

"I must warn you, Crawley. When we're up there, regulation states that my command is my command. If the worst comes to worst, my chaps don't take your orders." There was a cold rigidness to his words.

During the Battle of Dunkirk, it had been George Crawley who had rallied a contingent of what was left of the RAF flying in support of the trapped British Expeditionary force in France and provided cover for the civilian vessels that came to their rescue. It was a venture that had ended in disaster and remained to haunt George for the rest of his life. Though, he was rewarded for his eight kills that day and his many more over the disastrous campaign, he would remain bitter about it. But the war office insisted and it had ruffled the feathers of the other officers that a ranker had assumed command in the dire moments, failed, and still received praise. The young man had refused the medal and an official commendation for valor. He refused to accept the medals, refused to let the propaganda machine name him a hero when he had failed thousands of men that day.

But, to the warning and having Dunkirk thrown in his face, George just snorted and shook his head. "I swear to god, Snuffy … it's just the way you say things." He squinched his eyes shut as if the very sound of Bryant's voice was like nails on a chalkboard.

It was the back and forth volley that cemented a known fact that the inherent bitter hatred between Charles Parks Bryant and George Crawley would be long and ongoing for many more years to come. Both George and Sybil watched the other captain sneer his way out of sight.

"Prick …" He grumbled when he was gone. For a beat the scars of the failure to save a Medical Frigate on the English Channel showed in a moment of doubt. But they went away when he felt a chin lay ontop of his shoulder.

The raven haired mechanic just smirked grudgingly. "Ahh …" She grunted dismissively. "His mom used to clean our moms' shite, and now he'll never forgive us." She shook her head. It was an unspoken comfort, a wordless advise to let it go.

George gave her a strange look as they made their way to the fighter. "Sybil Branson!" He teased with fax outrage at her blunt and crass assessment of what was exactly up Charles Bryant's ass. "You kiss my mother with that mouth?!" He exclaimed. Climbing onto the wing, he looked back to see his cousin's eyebrow quirk curiously.

"It's better than what she's been kissing lately." She followed him up.

"I'd believe you." He chuckled sadly.

Every time he had a chance, for the last four years, George had gotten a hold of a London newspaper. The first thing he did was check the social pages. He had sporadically the fleeting notion of wondering if he had a new step-father, or if Donk had announced a private bill passing in the House of Lords that named Sybbie to replace George. He steeled himself each time for the final nail in the coffin. But that special kind of hurt never came. Each paper he picked up announced his mother's engagement to someone or another. A tycoon in May, a Marquis in September, and another movie star a couple of Decembers ago. It was a part of their mother's life that Sybbie did not write to him about. It was as he feared … him being gone, it hadn't changed his mother's life at all.

George pulled himself up and smoothly slipped into the cockpit without giving a second thought. He quickly began flipping switches on the dash. Sybbie quickly handed him his leather helmet and oxygen mask. She began updating him as he attached the hose to the oxygen tank and began priming the fuel pump.

"Alright … I patched the Hydraulics hoses and bypassed the electrical to give you a better …" Sybbie cut herself off when George flipped three switches to turn on the electrical in the fighter and it coughed back dead. Then, with a glare, he pounded a fist into the dash to which immediately the electronic equipment came to life at full capacity.

"Charge …" She finished with an innocent shrug and dimpled smile of pure charm.

She covered the hiccup by handing him "their" gauntlets from the waistband of her pencil skirt. The oil and hydraulic stained leather was supple and used as he began pulling them on. "I locked down the left stabilizer, but I didn't get a chance to weld it in there for good. So take it easy on the 90 degree up wind and hard turns below 1000!" She warned.

"Can't promise you anything, Sybbie!" George put on his padded leather helmet, already hearing the crackle of the radio in his ears under the sound of plane engines. Suddenly she forced a thin and bent chrome pipe in his face. He moved his head back before she hit him with her offering.

"What the hell is that?!" He shouted in irritation.

"Sometimes the air pressure seals the cockpit canopy! If you need to bail out, you're gonna need this to bust the glass!" She dropped the metal piping in his lap.

George examined the chrome item that had brown stains over it. "Wait a minute, is this from the fighter?!" he exclaimed. Noticing it had a vaguely machine like design.

"It was a spare part!"

"There's no spare parts on a Spitfire!"

"Hey, whose the bloody mechanic here, you or me, damn it?!"

He took the metal pipe and jammed it in between the seat and the side of the cockpit, giving the mechanic a dirty look. His eyes lit up a moment before he closed the cockpit as Sybbie stopped him. "Wait!" she exclaimed in a panic. He watched her reach into his uniform jacket to which she produced an item.

He felt stupid for almost forgetting the most essential item for his success. In the girl's hand was a little stuffed dog with a bejeweled collar. The ancient little girl's toy was worn and weathered in the many years of its existence. Mud from an old battlefield stained the fur and little button eyes were falling off. But even in its advanced age, the little stuffed Great Dame still had some magic left. It seemed like another lifetime ago that he had found it in the basement of Downton, amongst the old uniforms and frocks. But it had been his constant companion since and was his only luck when he had nothing else going for him.

There was something innocent and childlike in the way that Sybbie kissed the little stuffed animal and then held it out to George to do the same. In their usual ritual before doing something dangerous or highly stupid it was clear beyond any contest that even in the most dangerous of circumstances that George and Sybbie were still just kids.

They were all still just a bunch of kids.

Pinning the Great Dame next to the gages, he looked up one last time. Sybbie had run out of things to say as the planes began rolling out onto the runway in single file. They exchanged one final glance and in their parting moment let all of the happy memories together from Egypt to the very nursery of Downton crowd around them. It was always this way, one final goodbye, the unknown of this being the final time. It was never easy waiting for the moment when he landed his plane. Walking over to some dark corner behind a building and then embracing in tears hard and long, happy that he was alive for another day, one more hour.

"You alright?" She asked.

"Just fine …" He nodded.

There was a pause as he waited for her to say it. But it never came. Lady Mary wasn't there to make him say it, and they hadn't said it in years. They were both too tough for those three words. And they'd never tempt fate by uttering them. They only smiled at one another determinedly, wondering if today was the day that either one of them would say it. But today wouldn't be the day. They both found their need to bury their emotions both incredibly amusing and incredibly British. George reached for the cockpit handles and had pulled it closed a few inches...

"Such good luck!"

She seemed grudging for the closing scene to pull even that out of her. It was one last small victory for George that he wouldn't let her live down in that moment when he gave her a rough smile as he closed the cockpit.

Sitting in the buzzing quiet of the plane he only had a moment to himself, the world dying around him. There he let out an anxious sigh focusing on the Great Dame on his dash. He closed his eyes and thought of home one last time. Then he flipped on the engines and let the roar bring him right back to the action. In his ear pieces he heard the crackle of control directing traffic. Slowly he rolled his fighter into line. As he waited for his turn, building up airspeed before he left the dirt, he fiddled with the radio, trying to find the fighter group's channel.

 _Please don't be offended if I preach to you awhile.  
Tears are out of place in eyes that were meant to smile.  
There's a way to make your very biggest troubles small.  
Here's the happy secret of it all._

The sound of Marion Harris's voice echoed into his ears. He paused at the civilian radio signal that was being piped into the military network. There was something about the way the music crackled and the tin voice of the woman that gave him pause. He wasn't sure why, but there was something about the song, in that very moment of uncertainty, which was almost comforting. As the Spitfire began to come off the ground, George removed his hand off the radio dial and let the song play as he was carried onto the winds of the horizon.

 _Look for the silver lining  
When e'er a cloud appears in the blue.  
Remember some where the sun is shining,  
And so the right thing to do,  
Is make it shine for you._

Somewhere in the streams of time and space on a cold night, many years ago, this very song echoes through the lit foyer of a large stately manor house. There, two star crossed lovers, separated by circumstance and past mistakes dance together under a halo of light. They seem so close and yet so far away from one another. Regret, longing, and thousands of other emotions cloud the path to one another. Never knowing, never conceiving, dreaming, that many years later, on a bright summer day, the same song that played to their own private opera would carry their only child with comfort to war.

* * *

 **Acknowledgments**

" _Look for the Silver Lining" – Marion Harris_


	4. Leaves from the Vine - Part II

**Leaves from the Vine – Part 2**

"Leaves from the vine  
Falling so slow  
Like fragile tiny shells  
Drifting in the foam  
Little soldier boy  
Come marching home  
Brave soldier boy  
Comes marching home" _  
_

* * *

 _There was something dark and cold about the depths of the old manor. Down a winding staircase to the very foundations of a sanctuary built for holiness, and now occupied by a noble family for hundreds of years. It was hard to say what exactly you'd find in the basement of Downton Abbey. But for the starters it was a cold chill and endless darkness. In the stone work leading below were statues and carvings of medieval saints and figures whose meaning had been lost over the centuries of progress. Their ponderous eyes watching you the further down you go. A mysterious breeze, like the snoring breath of an ice dragon flickered the flame of the lantern which led the way._

 _Never had a small child been more frightened in his entire life, and yet never had been more thrilled. It was like another world, stepping out of the one he knew so well and into another time and place. He'd never been more excited by the prospect of seeing things so foreign to his sensibilities. Yet, for all the wonder, George Crawley's tiny hands were still clutching to the satin hugging Anna's rear end. His grip was so hard she was sure the young master would slip her skirt down to her ankles. There was something reassuring in her smile as she reached back and took his hand off her bum and into her palm as they walked the dark stone staircase with echoing scrapes._

" _There's nothing to be afraid of down here, luv." She comforted the boy. "Every night, Mr. Bates, Mr. Barrow, and even I come down here at least once to take or leave something." She shrugged. The boy nodded as they descended into the dark mouth of the ancient stone ruins of the dark ages that lay within the basement of Downton._

" _Stand here a moment." She left the boy next to something tall and cold. He watched with troubled blue eyes as the lantern light swung in the pretty woman's hand, its creaking echoed through the cavernous ancient ruins. "They were supposed to put some electrical lights down here … but they'd have to hammer a path, and Lord Grantham thought it impractical!" Anna conversed as she began lighting candles on stands all around the cavern._

 _The boy nodded as if she was right next to him. Placing his hands in his jacket pockets he leaned against the tall item standing next to him. It was cold and metal, but solid. Suddenly under the boys weight something collapsed next to him. It made a sliding clatter of warped metal against the ancient stone. His eyes bugged out at the loud noise._

" _You alright, Master George?!"_

" _I'm okay, Anna!"_

" _Just don't touch anything over there till I have lit up the rest of this place."_

" _Okay …"_

 _When she turned back, he quickly swung round and strained to pick up what fell. "Wow …" He muttered when he found a fearsome black dragon on the red field of a real knight's shield. His tiny hands felt the indention markings of where swords and mace had stricken it during its service during the height of "The War of Roses" centuries before. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the maid still lighting candles and placing their stands around a forest of trunks and luggage cases. With an effort filled grunt, he picked up the heavy shield emblazoned with the Grantham coat of arms. Stumbling backward, the boy nearly fell as he heaved it forward. Clumsily, he slammed it back against the knee to a handsome suit of lordly medieval knight's armor. But the tremor of the force caused the suit to start to slouch as if the Knight of Grantham was leaning down to confront the small boy himself for the rough treatment._

" _No, no-no, no!" George muttered. Hopping up and down, up and down, he was at a weight disadvantage trying to push it back to where it was. He was barely holding the suit of armor up with all of the limited strength in his small legs and back. George grunted and reached for the only leverage he could find to push the armor back so it wouldn't collapse._

 _The lady's maid gave a long frothing sigh while she lit the last of the candles. Unaware that quickly and quite absurdly, it seemed from a far that a small but determined boy was engaged in confrontational shoving that quickly escalated into a grappling match with a Knight of the White Rose behind her. She took a moment to look around at the labyrinth of suitcases and chests. There was something strange in the atmosphere, a regal sense of history that came with the sacred illumination of the remains of one the very first Christian Churches in Yorkshire. In each case, trunk, and chest were the clothing of a hundred different Lords and Ladies over the slow decay of centuries. She had known Lady Mary since they were both girls, she had seen Lady Edith leave the nursery, and had helped Lady Sybil take her first steps toward Lady Mary's waiting open arms. In all of that time she had often forgotten the long history of the Crawley family. How many Lords and Ladies, fortunes and dowries, had made this place, these people, who they were? How many awful uncles, spiteful mothers, wonderful fathers, and saintly grandmothers had shaped future generations for good or for ill? And there was a little bit of all of them in these chests. In her moment of reflection she wondered if someday all the people who made this house what it was and will be, people she loved like family, would be down here. If another maid would someday go through Lady Mary, Lady Grantham's chests and wonder about the women they belonged too once._

 _Anna Bates didn't often think of the future of Downton, it wasn't her concern or place. But when she was down here, staring into the very face of its history, she couldn't help but wonder what the future would hold. With a soft smile she'd go back and retrieve the creation and amalgamation of all those centuries of history and lore._

 _She turned and paused in puzzlement. With a rusted broadsword the future of the line of Grantham wobbly jabbed a suit of regal armor. With grunts the small child stabbed, momentarily popping the armored suit straight before it sank down toward him quicker and quicker with each thrust. Anna bit her lip in the shadow of this hall of legacy so she wouldn't laugh._

 _Feeling that he was being watched, the boy snapped back to find the maid gazing over the momentous duel between the ancient and the future heir of Grantham. "Ummm …" the boy tried to think of an explanation._

" _I think you got'em, Master George." She smiled warmly._

 _The boy was about to give an innocent smirk that was all his father, when the helmet came loose and dropped on his head. With an eye squinched shut he rubbed where it impacted. Anna's eyes grew wide and she let out a shameful cackle, hand to mouth. The split second distraction caused the entire slouching plate suit to finally collapse on top of the boy with a booming rain of metal clatter._

" _Oh, George!"_

 _Anna chuckled sympathetically while she rushed to unearth the boy from under the armor plating. When she found him, he was more apologetic than hurt. Anna rubbed out the aches, and, with guiding hand, patted him the rest of the way to the chests of clothing. Together they knelt next to a dusty hope chest. It still had the smell of treated wood and a lingering sent of a sweet perfume that coded George's hand. When he sniffed it he gave a hard cough._

" _Ugh, what is that?"_

" _Oh that's Lady Grantham's old perfume." She explained. "When your Aunt Sybil was a young girl, Lord and Lady Grantham had to travel to Newport when your Granny Levinson was sick. They had to leave your Lady Mother and your aunts behind. I fear that Lady Sybil didn't take it very well. She doused her Hope Chest with Lady Grantham's perfume so that it would be like she had never left." Anna seemed to be in another time and place as she told the story. "She was such a sensitive one when she was young." She smiled sadly, turning to George, and for a flickered moment in the flames she saw their most beloved fallen lady within her nephew's eyes and face._

" _That's a nice story." George seemed pensively enchanted._

" _It's both a nice and ironic story, depending on how furious Lady Sybil was with Her Ladyship over the years." They both traded a smirk._

 _Together, they opened the lid of the chest filled with memories that had been too painful to relive when they stowed it away in the basement. There was no sense of reverence to the way that George reached inside and began fiddling with things, picking up pieces of strange clothing that had gone out of style before his parents even knew one another's name. But for Anna Bates, her eyes grew glassy. Her fingers twitched in remembrance of how each piece of material felt, how it snapped on, and how to fit them to Lady Sybil's curves. She knew just how tight and how slack to make the corsets, how to lace the back of the silken and sequence frocks. The ribbon she used to tie in the young girl's hair, whose legs swung off the edge of Lady Grantham's bed as they practiced new hair styles for Lady Mary._

 _A single tear fell on a familiar aqua colored frock with pantaloons as a tiny hand picked up the jet and floral headband that went with it. She watched the boy next to her, living in his own world of curiosity, study it carefully and then put it on. He turned and gave her a goofy grin. Anna gave a sniffled chuckle and cleaned her eye, running her hand through his curls. She knew that he only did it to make her smile and she had never been more grateful for it._

 _It would be hard for anyone else, Lady Grantham, Tom, Thomas. It would be too hard for anyone to go down here and open old wounds like this. There were many times in which being a maid and a friend blurred. And this was one of them. She would've given anything not to be here, not to have to do this. But she was the only one, beyond Lady Grantham, who knew what would fit Miss Sybbie from Lady Sybil's clothing. And she didn't think she'd be able to make it without George being there._

 _As she began to dig through the clothing, George took off the headband and placed it down. She watched from the corner of her eye as the boy sat down and began examining the items in the chest. They were keepsakes, old toys, photos, and personal letters that he couldn't read just yet. They were evidence of a life, of the smiles and tears of a woman that lived a love filled life long before anyone knew that he would ever exist._

 _He had begun to sort out things that he knew that Sybbie might like, when he stopped. He looked at the items in his hands and then the chest. It never occurred to him that maybe he shouldn't be the one to do that. He never met his Aunt Sybil, she didn't know him, and he didn't know her. There was a strong possibility that she might not have even liked him. He had recently met his Aunt Rosamund and his Aunt Rose's mother. Both Women were not very fond of him, and in fact he was pretty sure that it was something that was becoming all too common upstairs. He didn't seem to see anyone anymore and he began to wonder if it was him. So at risk of making anyone else angry, he put the items down._

" _Hey, Anna?"_

 _When he looked up, the woman was looking over a little girl's blouse. She was muttering to herself about exchanging buttons and taking it in to compensate for no corset. But hearing her name being called she turned to the boy compiling interesting things to give to Sybbie._

" _Hmmm?"_

" _Do you think Aunt Sybil would've liked me?"_

 _Anna held his gaze for a long moment, seemingly having some sort of emotional reaction to the question. It was the same look that everyone got when his aunt was brought up. He knew not to ever talk about it, she only made people sad. And maybe it was a mistake to have brought it up now. But it seemed important to know that if his Uncle Tom and Sybbie were happier in their better world with the one person missing from it that he'd have a place in it too. Because, right now, in his own world, it was slowly shrinking till it only fit Mr. Bates, Anna, and Thomas._

" _No …" Anna sighed folding the shirt._

 _He didn't know why, but that hurt much more than he thought. His doe blue eyes were downcast as he morosely pushed a rolling horse next to him. Suddenly a hand swept his cheek. He looked up to see a bright smile on the maid's face._

" _I think she would've loved you very much." She handed the boy the shirt._

 _Warmth spread through his chest and something sad and yet touched flashed in his eyes. It was something that he needed to hear. It would seem like a bad place to be in, if his Aunt Sybil, a woman beloved by everyone who ever met her, who he was told he looked like, wouldn't have liked him. Something about the reassurance gave him a renewed confidence in helping Anna, of even just touching his aunt's things. With a small relieved smile, the boy placed the shirt on top of the small pile of things for his best friend._

 _Anna tussled the boy's hair as she looked around the area. "Lady Edith, Lady Mary, Lady Grantham, the dowager …" She counted the cases around them. "Do you mind if you go over there, Master George, and see what's in those chests … I can't remember." She pointed to a stack of trunks._

 _While she went back to examining the clothing, the boy got to his feet and quietly shuffled to a stack of black chests. On his way there he passed something tall, covered by a white sheet with aged dust and soot over it. With a curious tilt of his head, George gave a look back over his shoulder to see Anna still pulling out more of his aunt's clothing. Then, with an innocent tug, he let the sheet unravel and fall to the floor in a cloud of dust. There in front of him, he found an ancient mirror that had been blemished with age and a crack at its foot. There was something awfully sad about the mirror he couldn't place. Something horrible, something truly awful had happened to a young, beautiful, Countess of Grantham. And in her grief she had smashed the bottom of her mirror when she learned that the man she loved was not coming home to her. She had hung herself in the dining room on the night that an evil Marquis demanded she come into his bed or be branded a whore. Many years later her great-great-grandchild looked at his reflection in her mirror._

 _He gave a long sigh. While it was rare that small boys, or boys in general, ever had moments of self-reflection, George Crawley did give pause every once in a while. Seeing himself in the dark basement, surrounded by all this stuff, he wondered if he'd ever do right by it. Lately, he had a lot of time to himself to think about his place. The business with the knight was just the tip of his mistakes lately. He hadn't been doing too well in his tutoring, his reading was coming much too slowly, and no matter how hard he tried, he kept mixing up his words. For some days now he had been staring at books, hoping that the letters would become familiar somehow. Mr. Mosley had reassured him that these things take time, not everyone starts off running. But he didn't understand, he guessed no one could. Someday, he was supposed to be master of all of this, and lately he had been scared that he wasn't doing anything right. The knight, reading, growing taller, even just building a snow man, nothing ever came easy for little George Crawley._

 _More and more he was becoming aware that the estate was always in trouble, and only by some miracle was it saved. Sometimes by a scheme of his Uncle Tom, a loophole found by his Aunt Edith … but someday they wouldn't be there, someday it would be just him. And the small boy was deathly afraid some nights that he would be all alone to face the day he wouldn't be able to save the manor and the people who had given their life to it. He'd lose the town, the people, and everyone counting on him._

 _George Crawley was desperately afraid that he'd ruin everything._

 _There was a sudden sliding crash next to him. The boy jumped back and got into a crouched position as he watched one of the trunks fall backward, off a chest. He looked around for the cause, but he couldn't piece it together. His eyes were alert that something was going on, or his mind was just playing tricks on him._

" _Be careful, luv … And don't worry about those trunks, I think there's enough here for Miss Sybbie to grow into."_

 _George turned back to find that the maid still hadn't turned around, convinced that it was him that had over turned a trunk filled with his Great-Grandmother's things. He could say that he was slightly uneasy that something was going on, that even possibly they weren't alone down here. But the small boy couldn't say that it frightened him. Cautiously, he approached the chest that was now free from the trunk that had been placed on top of it. He wasn't sure what he was going to find in it, but he knew almost intuitively that he should open it anyway. He curved his little tongue out as he jimmied the clasp and popped it out. Before he opened it he gave a quick look back to Anna, to make sure that he wasn't doing anything that might get him in trouble. When the pretty woman seemed to be preoccupied in some happy reverie with a little girl's Victorian age frock in hand, he knew the coast was clear._

 _The dust made him give a shuttering sneeze, which might have come from a mouse from the way it sounded. Wiggling his nose, he pushed open the creaky chest to find a white sash with a red cross on it, on top of a white headscarf and a grey nurse's dress. The small boy tilted his head, then immediately took the items in hand. There was hardly an explanation for why children had the need to experiment, but to say that George Crawley did what any small child would when faced with a chest filled with foreign clothing._

 _He tried them on._

 _He tied the sash around his jacket sleeve. He knew that Mr. Barrow used to be in the Medical Corp. during The Great War. He told him that you had to wear it around you bicep so that people knew you were there to help. Next, he took the headscarf in hand and gave it a sniff, then, he sniffed it again. It smelt pretty good. The nurse who the head scarf had belonged too had worn a very appealing perfume or some sort of pleasing odor in her hair. Long strands of raven curls still clung inside when the boy put it on his head. He tightened it to fit, and began digging through the chest anew to see what else was inside. He made a quiet choking noise at the smell of the apron that seemed to have been treated with some sort of disinfectant before being placed in storage. Then, he ran his hands over the Nurse's uniform. The boy chucked both items over-shoulder in disregard. But in doing so something dislodged that was being hidden underneath. The small, plush, item hit the boy in the headscarf covered forehead and slipped into his lap._

 _With a frown he picked it up for inspection._

 _It was a little stuffed animal of a Great Dame, a small toy that had belonged to a little girl long ago. It had a little sequenced collar and the fur was stained with old mud that had fossilized in its long captivity in the forgotten chest. It seemed insignificant, an old toy that was misplaced, or thrown in by a random maid or footman as it was being carried down for storage. But from the first moment that George had the stuffed dog, modeled after a champion hound that belonged to Cora Crawley in the early years of her marriage, he couldn't let it go. It was like lighting had struck him with the little trophy in hand. There was something comforting and reassuring in the boy's moment of need. It was a steady and quiet calm of everything going wrong in the boy's mind. All his anxiety was tamed with the little Great Dame with him. There was a certain magic, a mystical item blessed by a night's prayer and a longing love between two people meant for one another, separated by a great war. In any other's hands they would've put it back. But in the hands of the soul their great love had created, it was a talisman._

 _When the boy gave the little dog a kiss and pocketed it in his jacket, it would be the last time the good luck charm would see the inside of a chest again._

 _Underneath the nurse's uniform, where the little dog was tucked, was the inside of an olive drab military hat of a British officer. The wool was also stained with fossilized mud, the rank insignia scorched and half melted in battle damage. Underneath the hat were a captain's uniform that was torn in places and stained with Scorches, mud, and some other rusted color that he didn't know. The boy took out the uniform and the worn leather gun belt coiled underneath._

 _George had heard many war stories in the past. His grandfather and Mr. Bates had fought the Boers, Thomas and his father was in the Great War, and even his very own house was a hospital that saw the face of war. But for the young master, he had yet to see any evidence. Much like that of his Aunt Sybil and his own father, people preferred not to talk about it. There was a great deal of reminiscing, and the good times that were had in the break of fighting. But this was the first time that George had ever seen a real military uniform that had actually been through battle. It was grungy and patched, like it had been torn more than once, caught by barbwire in No Man's Land. But even in its ragged appearance, it held something sacred and important for the small boy. He pressed his lips together and looked over it with reverence._

 _Standing, he carried the items with him to the mirror. Carefully, and with the uttermost respect, George began putting them on._

 _He placed on the cap, the brim slouching on his too small head which covered his eyes. It was only held in place by the knot on the back of the nurse's headscarf. Pushing up the brim, the sandy haired tot pulled the torn and stained officer's jacket around himself like a blanket. He squinched his cheek as he pulled his arms through the sleeve to find that they didn't fit, not even by a half. They made flappy noises as the boy pushed the sleeve back so that he could button the coat. He tried to fit the gun belt around him, but there wasn't a hole far enough for it to fit his little waist. Biting his lip, he buckled the officer's utility belt across his chest instead._

 _Finally, fully dressed, the boy stood in front of the mirror. It was a working progress, but there was something right about it, something fitting. From his grandfather, to his father, to even his butler, every man that was important had fought in a war. He wondered, wearing the uniform of this unknown captain, if there would be another war in his lifetime. He pondered if he'd be scared, if he'd be brave, and if he'd be a good soldier. All he knew is that he'd be ashamed if the time came and he did not volunteer. There seemed to be no choice but to fight for his sister, for his mother, for Sybbie and Marigold, and to protect Downton._

 _It was a feeling, an impulse, a promise that would remain with him for many years from now, all the way to the very first dogfight over Sedan._

 _As he primped the uniform in admiration he let out an agitated grunt to the slouching hat over his eyes. He pushed it back and admired his reflection only to pause. There was a figure in the mirror, in the distance. It was a woman who wore a tight white dress that was silken and fit her slender frame perfectly. She was a pale vision of beauty and easy elegance, her dark hair in a stylish bob. But in the light of the lantern she carried, there was a flash of deep and painful sorrow in her red tinted eyes. They were fixed unbrokenly to the small boy wearing the torn uniform that brought back so many memories of a young and true love._

 _The boy whirled around to find his mother, Lady Mary, standing next to the clatter of fallen plate armor. She was rendered speechless by the sight of George wearing his father's uniform. Clothing she hadn't seen in so long, she was sure it had been lost for good. She wasn't ready to face it yet, maybe ever again. But she was wholly unprepared to find it on her child._

" _M'Lady …"_

 _Anna got to her feet and walked over, and saw the shocked and stricken look on her employer's face. She turned and then did a double take to find George somehow wearing Matthew Crawley's old combat uniform, and standing in front of his lordships late grandmother's mirror. Her heart sank the longer the look of pain and heart ache stayed on the elegant woman's face._

" _We were just looking for clothes for Miss Sybbie. I didn't …" The lady's maid tried to explain the surprise of George's discovery. But she paused when Mary handed her the lantern, giving her a forgiving hand gesture._

 _There was innocence in the blue eyes of the boy that looked up to Anna. He wasn't sure what was happening, he didn't know if he had done something wrong, or if he wasn't supposed to touch any of the old things he found. But even in his moment of fear he did not retreat from his mother. Slowly she slid off her satin gloves as she approached the boy. Her hands were warm, her palms sinfully smooth as she cupped her little boy's cheeks._

 _There were a thousand things that seemed to be going hundreds of miles an hour in Mary Crawley's life. There were problems with the Estate, while trying to balance it with a fairly new marriage, and all the while trying to take care and feed a daughter who was constantly in need of her. When she wasn't visiting tenants as the agent, she was changing diapers. And when she wasn't changing diapers she was planning charities, all the while just making it to change for the dinner gong. Who needed sleep when your baby cried at all hours of the night? She would've given anything at this point to get a nanny, but the Turkish Bounty hung over the family name as her old sin that endangered her child. But it was moot at this point, because Mary had become so in tune with her daughter Cora's cries that she knew what each of them meant. It was something that a nanny wouldn't have time to learn now that the baby had a schedule._

 _They had been getting ready for dinner, Henry talking of the business that was booming, when a rude and strangely terrifying realization came over her. She hadn't seen George all day, not even for tea. Her husband had laughed off her worry, telling her that children play and explore all the time, to not worry. She'd have to apologize later for the harsh words she threw at him. He didn't seem to understand, no one did. This was George, he was special, the most special thing in the universe. He was all that was left in this world that Matthew Crawley ever existed. That name didn't seem to mean anything to people anymore, the world moved on, she had moved on. But there were times, such as this, when her mind was flooded with the memories, with the realization that George hadn't moved on, that he was still there._

 _She asked everyone where George was, but Mama, Barrow, and especially Mrs. Hughes's response wasn't what she had needed right now, honestly, it wasn't what she ever wanted to hear. In her rush for the last year she had barely given a thought about poor George. She had been content to know that he had the best people watching him, and of course he had spent so much time with Isobel. With everything going on, it was honestly a god send to know that at least her boy was in good hands. But only now when she and her mother had taken up the search, had they learned that this was not the first time, nor even a recent activity that George had gone missing. She had been distressed to learn from Mrs. Hughes that not only was it a regular occurrence, but that he sometimes disappeared for an entire day, sneaking back just in time to dine with the staff. It was only distressing more, when she couldn't remember her time with George lately. Shamefully she had come to realize that she hadn't spent any time with the boy, or even given him a thought._

 _She had been in pain and seemed more frantic than she should've been when looking for her son. In her time being a mother to a little girl and a new wife, she had forgotten the one thing, the one person, who had been there at her lowest. When Mary Crawley had nothing, not hope, and no future, she had always had George. Now it was as if she had thrown him away in her new, magical, happiness in a brand new family, a family that was only becoming all too clear that George had been left out of. She would apologize to Daisy later when she blustered and all but laid her hands on the girl when interrogating her about her son's whereabouts._

 _All she needed to hear was that he had gone down to the basement with Anna for her to take Carson's lantern and descend the steps. And what she found was everything that she had spent the last couple of hours fearing. It was a blur of paper work, money, rocking a baby, and spending time at the auto shop with Tom and Henry. Then, someday, she'd come to her senses and she'd be standing on a train platform and her boy, her old rock, the last piece of Matthew she'd ever have, had grown up without her. But when she reached the foot of the stairs there he was, George Crawley, in his father's uniform, off to war. He'd have no memory of his mother, no sense of home, nothing but his father's courage to comfort him in the trenches._

 _It was her worst fear of all._

 _Seeing the uniform had brought back so many memories, so many instinctual emotions, and so much nostalgia. An unspoken love shared on a train platform, a concert broken up with so much relief, a telegram in the night, and the torn up sight of a man she dreamt of every day and night. Mary could still feel the sun as she pushed his wheel chair, the tingle of the snow on her cheeks as he spun her around at their engagement. It was supposed to be a happy ending. A magic conjured by fate that was sown somewhere in the stars. Now that he was gone, and those days were nothing but flicking memories of her wild years. The only time she could only touch and relive those flashes of passion and devotion was when she touched those sandy blond curls and saw a toothy grin._

 _Mary had let go, told herself that it was the only way to survive, to move on with Henry. She knew she'd have too if there was ever going to be life after death. But now faced with the sight of the boy in his father's uniform she remembered it all. She was flooded by emotions that could not be filled by reason or exercised into control. Coming to realize that forgetting was not the same as letting go. And standing in front of her was a little boy constructed out of love, a symbol that once, long ago, there was a man named Matthew Crawley and he loved a woman named Mary Crawley. Fate and circumstance had brought them together, had guided them through entails, great wars, and broken engagements. All that strife, heart ache, longing, and reciprocation of souls joined in a great wheel of love and tragedy and the only proof left, that they ever existed, was a part of him and a part of her that had created the tiniest, bravest, little soul looking up at her._

 _And she had forgotten._

 _The woman reached down and picked the boy up in her arms. In one sweep Lady Mary had collected the boy in the uniform jacket and held him as tight as a drowning woman in open sea to a life saver. She kissed his tiny face and buried her face into the hat._

" _My darling, oh my darling!" She sobbed nuzzling the wool hat. "I'm so sorry …" She whispered._

 _She apologized to both her little boy and to the man that would always be there, always answer her prayer when she needed it …_

 _Needed him._

* * *

On the brightest of sunny days there was a golden hue that shinned off the rolling grassy plains of the English country side. The trees were rustling and cracking in the warm breeze of the perfect summer day. It was a sight that should've brought peace to those with a troubled mind and soul. But it seemed to do nothing for Lady Mary Crawley as she stared out the window. Her thoughts were cast outside of the confines of this time and place. Back to a day that wasn't so different than it was today. It might have been much colder and grayer clouds in the sky. But it was like today in that she had only two people in mind, one to worry about and the other to mourn.

Beyond the clicking of the train wheels as they rolled across the lush Yorkshire country, her eyes were fixed on the wooded road that was across the rolling field. She knew it so well and had traveled it many times in her life. It was the road to Ripon, and to follow it through they'd reach Downton. Her first carriage ride was down that road, the first time she was returning home as a married woman. So many memories were made on that one stretch of gravel and dirt. And yet she preferred the train, because of the little stone cross that lay there. It didn't have a name, or a date, or a reason for why it was there. In a decade, in a century, no one would know why it was put there. She wasn't sure if anyone knew even now. But she did. Because, it was the place in which she, in truth, had lost everything. It was the spot where her world had fallen apart and she was just too simple to know it in the half a decade afterward.

She sometimes thinks of what had been going through his head. It would seem unnatural, almost completely insane if she had told people that she knew exactly what Matthew was thinking. He was happy, beyond happy, he was in a simple and excited state of euphoria. For so many years it was all he had ever wanted for the two of them. And on that day she had given it to him. He had a child, a son, a boy that was all their own. In that happy year before, it didn't seem real, their marriage. Even when they fought, they hadn't actually fought. After all the heartache of that terrible war, after a year in that wheel chair, there was nothing worse they could do to each other, that life and fate had not done to them already. But when the baby was born it felt, for a true moment of bliss, like a story book. Lady Mary Crawley had tasted her happily ever after, for a few mere hours. Their love had created something so wonderful, so perfect, that there was nothing left to conquer afterward. The only thing to do was to count how many perfect bundles they'd have and how many times they could create this moment over and over again. That was what was going through his mind when he was taken from her, when he'd never return from the lonely stretch of country road.

Mary would never feel the same way as she did that day. When her daughter was born it was a happy occasion. The family had come to see her baby and they celebrated. It was the end of a long dark winter that had hung over the family for so long. But those memories of that jubilee, that moment of true heaven being taken from her, it haunted what should've been a moment of bliss. And even though they had arrived without a scratch, began to make a life, Mary could feel that this was not meant to last. Somewhere deep inside she could feel that this substitute would not hold.

And so it didn't.

They all would talk about the cold, beautiful, mother of a dead daughter who did not cry a tear, a woman who sat at the funeral and had nothing for the tiny casket lain in the ground. She had not even a facial tick as they put her husband in the communal cemetery in the middle of the night. Tom had held her hand, stood vigil with her, but she did not confide sorrow to him. Her father offered, then pleaded, for her to let him call the minister, allow Henry to be buried in the family cemetery next to his daughter. But Mary couldn't conjure up the fight for it. Henry was a murderer, and even murderers with righteous reasons were buried in Potter's Fields. She didn't make the laws.

Her family was there for her, as they had always been. And they all tried to reach through this cold aloofness that had settled on her heart. It was the same old speeches that she had heard when Sybil and Matthew had died. But how much more loss could she take? How many more times could she hear Tom, Carson, and Granny, before she even became numb to their compassion? A part of her died with her daughter and Henry, a fake part of her that had tried to carry on, that she tried to build after Matthew was gone. But the truth was that Mary Crawley died that day with her beloved. So it was that they hadn't just laid the stone there in the leaves and twigs for Matthew. They had laid it for both of them, for their love. Because it wasn't just where Matthew Crawley died, it was where she died as well.

Slowly, the years melted from one to the next, and she had expected things to change. But every day, looking in the mirror, going from suitor to suitor, nothing ever changed in her reflection. She thought she'd look a horrid hag, shriveled and cold, and yet nothing could keep the men away. They chased her like a fox in the hunt, and she allowed it. Wines, posh restaurants, grand hotels, and expensive trips were the things they offered. But in all the pampering there was nothing that could crack her cold veneer. She could never be tied down. They could never get what they really wanted from her in the end. Fore they were chasing a vampire, a ghost, and the undead.

Mary Crawley had no life inside her anymore.

But sometimes in the night, when it was very quiet, she could still hear a baby crying. Like a phantom limb, was the woman inside her that still worried if that small little boy that was so perfect on that grand day, was okay. She thought herself cold, mean, maybe even a little sinister, and yet in the dark of the night she remembered what it was to be a mother. They didn't speak George's name anymore, he had left for good, and it was all her fault. But when every impulse in her body had told her, over the years, to go to him, to bring him home, she was reminded that she was not made for happiness. Mary had already cursed those she had loved with this specter of suffering. She had seen the deaths of Sybil, of Matthew, Henry, and little Cora. She had watched all of Edith's happiness fall away with each stillbirth she delivered. Mary was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that her pursuit of her only child would only end in heart ache, as did everything else in her life.

For fourteen years Lady Mary was convinced that she could not feel anything anymore. This woman as pale and cold as a winter twilight, was immune to love, sadness, anger, and joy. But even in her cruel indifference to life around her, when she saw no light in the world or in herself, she was so suddenly filled with something that was shattering this ice fortress she had constructed around her.

It was fear.

By happenstance, a few months past, on a dark evening, the family had gathered together. It was a dreary affair that was filled with the uncertainty of war. They had all just come from attending Anthony Gillingham's funeral. The Rear Admiral had died on the last day of the Dunkirk evacuation. Mary had remembered their courtship, their nights of passion in Liverpool. It the blow had fallen heavy upon her. It seemed slowly, little by little, everything in her life after Matthew seemed to slip away. She had felt guilty, terribly guilty, seeing Tony's wife Mabel standing with her girl and young son at his grave side, weeping. How many happy years did she rob from Mabel and Tony playing a silly game? Why did she ever think that she could ever have a life after Matthew? Why did she torture people so with her delusions? Mabel was unhappy to see Mary there, but then she was grateful she was. They were the only two women that knew Anthony Foyle the best. Mary agreed with a nod as they watch the grave diggers bury him. But the truth was that Mary didn't know Tony all that well, who he was, who he really was didn't interest Mary all that much in those days. And, standing by his graveside years later, she felt ashamed of that. Tom tried his best to comfort her, but she knew she was a horrible person for it.

After the funeral Rose and Atticus had come with their family to stay for a while, they all needed lifting of spirits with the whole family present. But there was no escaping the topic of the war, of the disaster in France. That night Atticus announced his intention to join the Royal Army, asking for Lord Grantham's help in a good posting. Lady Grantham had insisted that Rose and her children Rachel and Hugh stay at Downton during the war. There hadn't been children in the halls for quite some time, not since Sybbie and Marigold had all but grown up. They had all agreed that there needed to be the dominance of youth once again to make the old place feel like home once more. But in all of the excitement of having all of the family back under one roof again, there was a dread of what was to come, this was after all a war that no one had seen in many centuries. Not since the Spanish Armada, had England been under threat of invasion. The humor of the night was dark, and their true feelings even darker. By the reading of the papers, France, which was fought for so bitterly and so long, in the Great War, fell in a month to the Germans. It seemed in no time at all that the whole world would belong to Adolf Hitler.

But faith and fear came to Downton in the sound of a knock. A man had come from the War Office. He apologized for disturbing their dinner, but there had been a long confusion about where to send the item he carried. Mary still remembered the sudden stopping in a cold heart when her father was asked where George Crawley could be found. After being informed that this was, technically, his house, the man presented Lord and Lady Grantham with a medal and commendation of valor for their mistaken son George Crawley. With a kind cup of tea and a plate of pudding, the lucky veteran of that awful day told the party first hand of Dunkirk. He spoke of the escape off the shores of France on fishing boats. His voice hitched in his remembrance of watching, with his heart in his mouth, the black trails of smoke in the sky as the Nazi planes were fought off by a hand full of the remaining RAF pilots, led by the Crawley's young aviator. It was a heroic deed that earned the medal he had awarded to the Count and Countess of Grantham that the young hero seemed to shun and wholly reject. When asked why, the soldier got suddenly quiet, he had begun to mention something of a Medical Frigate and Tony Gillingham, but found it very hard to speak of in front of George's family. So, instead, he decided to make his departure.

With a kind thank you for the Crawley's hospitality for the meal, he left a wake of great pride and crippling fear in the house. No one had known that George was back in England, much less that he had joined the British Expeditionary Force in France. For so long there had been nothing but tragedy and bitter regret that was associated with the young man's name. But after the tales of the daring pilot protecting soldier and civilian alike against overwhelming odds, there was a shift in the wind with the medal in hand, even if the ace pilot refused to take it.

Robert Crawley had been to war, had his own assortment of medals he wore on his dress uniform for regimental dinners. But all that night, the old man knew only his grandson's medal. At all times he could be seen staring at it, a soft smile of pride on his face, as if it was his own child's trophy. He had never had a son of his own, a man who only knew daughters. He had taken great pride in the men that they loved so dearly over his life. Only Matthew's accomplishments had come close to bringing a fatherly pride for a son. Before that night, Lord Grantham had forbid talk of George in his presence. It was easy to say that only the death of his daughter was worse than the night that his grandson had left. The pain for the last four years had been excruciating for the old man who slowly watched his family's life work dry up in the years to come without inheritance to secure the line. But it was like the first blossom of spring had come over the winter of malcontent in Robert's heart as he heard of the young pilot's deeds and heroism in defense of a country, of a people, that the boy did not consider his own. Whatever opinions, preconceived notions, he might have had of the adventurer and air racer half a world away that lived only in Sybbie's letters, it seemed to lighten when he heard that his heir had not entirely given up on his higher duty to fighting for the greater good. It was all the faith that a moralistic English Gentlemen could ask for in his own blood.

The rest of the family seemed excited, proud, invigorated by the story. There was a swell of patriotism and renewal of spirit from the long dark of the coming storm just across the shore. They had all made a fuss, wanted to be a help to the war effort in some way, believing that they'd be helping George somehow. But for Mary, that night, she retreated to her room.

They had all heard the daring deeds of a young aviator, a war hero, flying his plane through the skies and protecting their good chaps. But Lady Mary only heard that her boy, her last child left to her, was all alone. Those German pilots, dozens of them, had tried to kill her child, and continued to do so over and over again. They had gotten his friends and comrades, till he was all alone up there, with no one to protect him. There was nothing cold or unfeeling in the failure she felt as a mother, to know that thousands of men were out there with no other purpose but to hurt her child and she could not protect him.

It tore her apart.

For years she had heard of half-stories of a young rogue of English Aristocracy breeding being accused by the German Cultural Ministry of being a grave robber after gun fighting skirmishes with Nazi soldiers in the colonial Mid-east. Then there were stories of a racer pilot wagering the Levinson family assets against the mockery of a war decorated German Baron in an air race outside a Crusader Castle in Palestine. One Speed Record and a humiliated Nazi racer pilot later, Cora Crawley received a letter from her family lawyer's in New York exclaiming that she was a millionaire once more. But the most troubling to all of their family was the rumor circulating in the London society circles and the ranks of the German Army of a fortune, growing grander for the last twenty years, that was promised to any man bold enough to scratch off the heir of Grantham. It was a bounty perpetrated and fermented for Twenty-eight years by a vengeance mad **Turkish Matriarch** who promised an eye for an eye against Lady Mary Crawley. It was a story, a warning, brought to her attention by many nannies that refused to work for the Crawley family because of the fear of being caught in middle of this dangerous bounty. Though for years Sybbie, Marigold, and even Edith, warned of the truth of the price this Turkish princess had placed on George's head, Mary never believed the story, it being so far-fetched that a woman half a world away would want her son dead over _an accident_. But now, in war, it was a simple fact that her child was in clear and present danger from an enemy that was more than stories and ancient history.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

The renewed spirit of Downton was dampened after that night. First Atticus had left to join the RAF, a favor to Robert and Cora. Mary wasn't surprised to find that Atticus somehow being reassigned to command whatever Fighter Group George was in after flight school. It was a heart felt goodbye, watching the tears in Rose's eyes, the shake of a young son's hand, and a kiss of a teenage daughter who was the apple of his eye. It made Mary mourn the fact that she hadn't been there to see off George when he enlisted. It hurt terribly to think that there was no one there for him when he signed his life away to this conflict. No goodbye at the platform, no stuffed dog with a bejeweled collar, and not even so much as a "Such good luck" To comfort him as he went.

Then, Sybbie went off to York to join "The Ministry of Aircraft Production" as a mechanic. It was another goodbye, this time a much more painful and personal one for all of them. Tom was in tears as he held onto all he had left in this world, all he had left of Sybil, afraid of losing her again. Sybbie had tried to play down that she was only working in York. She assured him nothing had changed except the engines she'd be working on. But they all knew better. Tom, Mary, and Edith knew at first chance she'd find a way to get to George and then she'd be in just as much danger. For Mary and Cora it was one of the hardest things to let go. Sybbie was the first grandchild, the first baby in Downton, the beautiful, tough, little lady that everyone loved so much. And now she had left all of the people who loved and protected her all these long years chasing the worst kind of danger just to be at the side of a best friend, a brother. When she left Lady Mary felt as if her very own daughter, who she loved so much, had left the nest.

Finally, right after Sybbie left, Marigold went as well. Sharing a flat together in York with Sybbie, She went to work for the RAF, as one of the girls in Fighter Control for the Yorkshire Air Shield. It was hard for Edith to let go amongst all of the parents. The beautiful young woman, often complimented by Rachel Aldridge as looking like a fairy Tale princess, was her mother's only living child, her only rock in her lonely world. Her husband had all but left her after their little babies had come out still and motionless. Mary had never seen a sadder, more horrible sight in her life. Their mother had been there each time for Edith, but Bertie could no longer bear it. They blamed themselves for why they couldn't have a living child. And in her shame, Edith returned to Downton, Marigold in tow. From that time on Mary had watched the girl grow up, becoming more and more beautiful as the days went on. It was hard to imagine Edith of all people giving birth to such a lovely creature. But while Sybbie was remarkably independent, a paradox of if George was a bad influence on her or if she was the bad influence on him, Marigold was attached to her mother and grandmother in a way that her two cousins and best friends were not. She was a tender hearted angel who was afraid of leaving her mother to a lonesome life by herself. All she wanted was for those who she loved to be happy. Mary and Edith never got along, but Mary could never hate, or even be indifferent to Marigold. She loved that beautiful golden haired sunflower with all of her heart.

But with Lady Mary, her parents, Edith, Rose and her children as well, the place was full of life again. But it could not be mistaken for the old days. Then, during the last war, there were wounded men to worry about, and only Matthew in danger to provide sleepless nights. Now it was not just lovers and footmen in the trenches, but their own children that were in the thick of it as well. Everyone had someone to worry about, someone that they loved more than life itself looking down the barrel of a Nazi gun. At all hours of the night, walking down in a robe into the darkness of the old manor, you could find a mother or wife sitting in the library with a cup of tea in hand, and tear on their cheek. All of them, on any given night, sat close to one another, holding hands through the long night. Sleep not coming when fearing the telegram to arrive, or to look at the lists of the dead in the local morning paper to find a familiar name at the top.

They had all gathered around the radio on "Eagle Day", both upstairs and downstairs, to hear of the massive air battle that had broken out unexpectedly. It was the largest in the history of the world. For hours and hours they sat in the foyer and listened with anxiety to the desperate reports of the chaos over the blue skies of the south. Echoing through the halls of Downton were the descriptions of black smoke and plane trails crisscrossing over Big Ben, fiery crashes through southern town squares, and fighters chasing one another through buildings of familiar cities for cover. It was a horror like nothing Mary or anyone else born in the Victorian age could ever dream of hearing. It seemed that the entire British sky was blotted out by a war that was so close to heaven's pearly gates that it never even touched the ground. When it was over, the Nazi Offensive beaten back for the day, and England still standing at the sunset, Lord Grantham led all the occupants of the house in a toast to every pilot alive and dead who saved the old kingdom. When they took the sips of their wine or cider, they all had different names in mind.

But it wasn't till a couple of weeks ago when Mary had gotten her cold dunk in a bucket of water that had shaken her out of the decade and a half of frozen apathy. A rude awakening to the cruel vibrancy of a world she had tried to leave so abruptly. On the day that they had been making arrangements to go down to London in order to bring her Aunt Rosamund's body back to Downton, there was a visitor. When she came down the stairs it was as if she had walked into a public execution. Everyone was afraid, unmoving, unblinking, as they stood in the foyer. And there by the door, with a barely composed Thomas, was an old gentleman from the war office. He had asked for Lady Mary personally. She didn't quite remember anything for a minute afterward. She was only vaguely aware of Rose fleeing up the stairs in tears of relief and crushing guilt for that emotion. She remembered Edith's tears as Tom held her hand. Her mother taking one of Mary's arms, and her father collapsing in a side chair. He was beside himself in soul crushing and life defeating grief.

But then all she remembered seeing after was crimson. The old gentleman held out his hand for her to shake. Her red tinted eyes were in a rage as the man congratulated her for giving birth to a hell of a chap. In his hand was not a telegram informing her of her last child's death, but that he was awarded another medal, for his ascension to the rank of "Double Ace" with his record number of confirmed kills over London during Eagle Day. When she snapped too, Tom, Thomas, and her father were prying her hands off the old man's neck as she promised to kill him for what he had just put her through. Her mother had snatched the medal box and commendation from the man and told him politely, but firmly, to leave at once.

Anna had helped her to her room afterward and there in their shared privacy Mary broke down for the first time in twenty years. Her sobs were angry and hysterical as Anna held her. That moment, when she thought she had lost everything, it was too much to bear. For so many years she cared for so little and now it was as if her heart would burst from her chest. She had never been more afraid of anything in her life than the moment that she thought she had lost George. It was much worse than losing Matthew. It was as if she had let him down. This was their boy, their baby, and she had allowed him to be alone for so long, to make his own way in this world without her touch, her love, ever being present. This boy, this young man, which was the capsulation of all their love, had no sense of what he meant, what he represented to his father, to his mother, and all the trials that had tested them. She never fathomed how close it was that day. How close that light, that goodness, being snuffed out in complete ignorance of its importance by Nazi cannons amongst the clouds.

Later that night, as the manor tried to sleep, the events of the day shaking the fragile state of the residence, Mary slipped out. She walked to a very familiar place within the village. Crawley House was maintained the way George had left it. Mrs. Hughes had the maids keep it that way at the insistence of Anna. It was the home that had brought Matthew to her, a place she often walked past in her youth, her red eyes drawn to the room on the far left. In the days of their courtship and in their longing, she often found herself on the cobble street below looking up at Matthew's room, seeing him in the refection looking down on her. They never waved or did anything that acknowledged this type of secret meeting. It was simply a rough smirk and a knowing smile as she stood by the light post. It wasn't a passionate cove where they met, or stealing kisses in abandoned country ruins. But it was just as romantic, just as meaningful for the man of her dreams to peer down and see her there, her presences a silent declaration that he was all she thought of, and walking back to Downton she knew that she would be all he thought of that night. Together they'd be intoxicated by the sheer torment of a love that burned away everything inside of themselves till only the two of them remained in each other's hearts and souls.

Entering the house, she immediately went up the stairs and to the left. It was room that she had never really seen before, never been inside before. And she found it shameful, because, for nearly thirty years, it had been the bedroom that belonged to the two men she loved most in the world. There were posters for air races, books on famous excavations, and scholar's journals about ancient Israel. She even found an expense book that had George and Sybbie's hand writing on it. The nine and ten year olds were saving money to start their own airplane racing team. She smiled through tears at the proposed names the children, her children, had come up with. For most of the night she looked over every inch of paper, and touched every toy in the room, trying to understand her child again, to know who he was when he had left Downton. Defeated of the notion, she curled up on his bed and slept at Crawley House that night, dreaming of a little boy dressed in his father's uniform, primping in front of her great-grandmother's mirror. He had been so brave, so strong, and so good.

But any sort of connection to that precious boy was a moot point, because for all these things he had left behind. Downton had never been truly his home. He had spent so much time abroad, that in his teenage years, he joined up with the races when they came through New Orleans. A fourteen year old journeying across America, racing horses during the Depression, the only people who would know her son the best in those days were Indian cross-breeds, Poor Irish immigrants, Southwestern Cowboys, and … Edith, oddly enough.

She was vaguely aware of some sort of incident involving a _**Turkish Emissary**_ that was not really an Emissary and a gang of former Mexican Revolutionaries on a border town. It had been some great dust up involving Tom, Edith, Sybbie, Marigold, and of course, as always the perpetrator, George. It had happened the last time they had gone to retrieve her son from America in Isobel's last year. All in the party were mutually sworn to secrecy of the events, but Edith in particular was vaulted as a hero to the children and, a bruised and battered, Tom who was ever grateful to her upon their return to Downton. Edith's superiority and long held monopoly of the children's affections annoyed Mary at the time, so she did not care to ask about the little group's Wild West Mexican adventure. But in her desperation to know something about the lost years of her child's life, she'd be willing to sit through her sister bloviate her self-glory in order to know what had happened, after they all return home.

From the window, she turned to the first class cabin in the commuter engine. In the crowded and rushed train, the seats were hard to come by. For some reason, upon seeing the packed first class compartments, Mary couldn't help but think of what her Granny would say. She figured it would have something to do with cattle cars and a lack of positional awareness, even in a time of war. Lady Mary was pressed against the window, with Tom tucked in beside her. She was grateful for it, being the Irishman's big broad shoulders pushing against her, rather than some stranger. If she were to be groped, rather it be by the accidental shoulder she knew, rather than purposeful ones she did not. Behind her sat her parents who were just as imposed upon. Though, unlike Mary, who was pliable in these situations, her father seemed to be at his wits end. Even when they were being thrown in with the high class, trapped in close spaces with family friends and familiar strangers looking to go as far north as north went, they were all still trapped in close spaces. Cora, while inconvenienced, was just happy to be going home.

Lady Grantham, though never looking her age, was not built for warfare and the London bombings. Mary had done the best she could, along with her father, in comforting her. But the ordeal in the shelter, the rain of soot on their heads, the cries of fear amongst the crowd, and concussive aftershocks of falling buildings above had shaken her terribly. With the exception of Robert Crawley, It had been all of their first shelling, all their first taste of real combat. As her mother buried herself in her husband's arms, her strength coming from his comforting whispers, Mary huddled close with Tom. She wondered if this was what Matthew had felt like in the trenches. Did he cling to her memory as she clung to his with each explosion above their heads? Was he just as afraid as she was, sitting there with hundreds of strangers, or was he the pillar that he had always been for her? All she knew was that whatever he had been for those men, he still was for her, trapped in a shaken box of concrete.

Back on the train she only momentarily smiled at the man with a military radio across from Tom. The two men were engaged in light and friendly conversation. He was a War Correspondent for the London Times. Together they had reminisced about once being newspaper bullpen Journalists, and the rigors of the job. The old journalist found his comfort in a bottle in those days, while Tom found his in returning to Sybil's arms each night. Lady Mary had only caught a snippet of the conversation, but she couldn't have found any emotion stronger than love for the man next to her. Even years later, Sybil was all he thought about, all he dreamed about. Sometimes Tom Branson was the only one who understood what it was to lose a part of yourself, and after decades later still mourn the one who had completed you. He was the only one who knew her daily struggle, who knew Mary Crawley the best.

With a long sigh, she shuffled through pictures again. From the time Atticus had left, Mary had always known that her father still had enough pull in the War Office to get Atticus transferred to George's command. Since then, the man wrote two letters each week, one to his beloved Rose, and the other letter to the rest of them. Sybbie talked to Tom every week as well, and Marigold to Edith every day. But Atticus was their eyes and ears to what was really going on with George and Sybbie. He reported on the things that weren't written home about. Edith had asked if they shouldn't all feel a bit guilty for having Atticus spy on George and Sybbie for them. But Mary didn't mind, as it was the only news and glimpse into her son's life she might ever have. But the best part was that for the first time his letter came with pictures.

And best of all it was of George's birthday.

Atticus had penned the story of their fighter group being relieved long enough for a night or two of rest after "Eagle Day" action. In between new recruits being transferred to replace recent losses, and being assigned to Yorkshire sector, George, Sybbie, and a few surviving American pilots had jumped in an old car Sybbie had fixed up. On their ruckus drive up to York, they sung loudly the Garry Owen and a dozen other Irish rebel songs, acting like a bunch of dumb kids for the first time in four months. They had all ended up at a pub in downtown York and saluted their own "Triple Ace" by inviting the most beautiful woman in the whole of England to "thank him personally" for his patriotic service. Sadly, that girl happened to be Marigold. Suffice to say that despite Sybbie and their friends, laughing themselves to tears over the purely accidental mix-up, George and Marigold didn't find it all that damn funny at all.

Sympathy was on Mary's face each time she looked over the pictures of Marigold. The girl with long tresses of golden blond hair had taken great pains to make herself a pure vision of ethereal beauty. From her white silken gown, her mother's gloves, her red lipstick, and perfect ringlets, she was a picture of grace fit to meet the dapper man of her dreams at a glamorous Hollywood picture. And the poor darling positively looked heartbroken sitting across the lap of a handsomely rugged, scruffy youth, in a navy blue Henley long sleeve, and beaten double breasted leather coat. George looked fit to murder. Sybbie had thought it sporting to have "the soul mates" take pictures together. They both declined, till the mechanic swept Marigold off her feet and carried her to George. The two looked to be in pure hell at the jovial mockery that swept over them as Sybbie dropped their teenage cousin into George's lap as the whole pub sung happy birthday to him.

There was nothing but the fondness of the heart upon seeing the other picture. Though, she would say that it wasn't one for mama and papa to see. It seemed to be taken right after the last. Marigold was still in George's lap, though this time their incredulous look was added upon by both giving the cameraman their middle finger. Sybbie was standing behind the "happy couple" with her chin resting on the top of George's head. The girl made a pouty bottom lip and puppy eyes at the camera in clear mockery of her cousins annoyance.

But by far Mary's favorite was the last one. In which it seemed to be the end of the evening from the casual look of the party. In the picture was all the children comfortably squished into the leather booth in the back of the pub. Marigold was wearing George's old aviator's coat, Sybbie's mane of raven curls were down, and George had his sleeves pushed up. The three, fit comfortably snug together, had a mug in hand and were toasting the camera with contently happy faces. Lady Mary ran an affectionate thumb over the glossy photo and smiled softly. She hadn't been ready to see them so grown up, George with facial hair and shaggy loose curls, Sybbie with her father's smile and her mother's wild confidence and beauty, and Marigold fresh and perfect like a drop of golden rain. And yet she still saw the babies in the faces, the convoy of energetic little darlings running through the weeds and across bridges being chased by Edith, Thomas and Papa. She could still remember feeling all the love in the world, being moved so deeply by just standing at the door of the nursery and watching them sleep so peacefully on quiet cold nights. She remembered telling Tom and Edith that if only she could've lived in those moments forever, knowing that all was right in the world.

It seemed a long time ago that life had started taking from Mary Crawley rather than giving, and a part of her felt a pang of sorrow for how far away those days in the nursery were. But, for all the lost nostalgia, she had never felt happier to have the picture. For all that was missing in their lives, for all the mistakes that were made in their rearing, for all the years of separation … When the world was breaking down and at the brink of the abyss, at some pub in York, George, Sybbie, and Marigold had found each other and ever remained stuck together.

It was all any one of their parents could ask for in what felt so close to the end of all things.

"Oh my god!"

Suddenly there was a civil but frightened commotion that ran through the length of the train. Mary looked up from her and Tom's pictures and to the rest of the crowd. People were pushing into the compartment's left side crowding around the windows. She stood in unison with Tom and her father behind her as the panic began to build. It was like the leaping of electricity through a crowded heard in the middle of a puddle. From the second class car she could hear the scream and tears of frightened refugee children. The sounds of the unknown terror were motivation enough for Mary to push past Tom, and some familiar acquaintances to get a peak of the opposite window across the row. She was just slender enough to get through and stare.

"We must stop the train!"

"Don't be mad, we'll be sitting ducks, sir!"

"Please, we must do something!"

"Just remain calm!"

Red tinted eyes looked out over the rolling green of Yorkshire on a bright and glorious summer day. There in the distance, was a great and swift moving shadows passing over the breezy and wooded canopies of the trees. It was like a great cloud that sometimes shades the sky, but it was moving fast, too fast. She looked up while shielding her eyes from the sun, and then a pain ran up her chest, tightening her throat and jaw. It was a large group of flying figures moving against the breeze, their dark metal canopies glimmering in the summer sun. They moved in meticulous marshal formation, like a coordinated flock of birds of war. Lady Mary found it oddly beautiful, despite the situation.

"Mary what is it?!" Tom called to her.

"Yes, by god, tell us!" Her father stood with Tom in the middle of the row.

"Planes, Nazi, dozens of them, and they're heading right for us." She tried to remain as passive as she could in order not to panic the other passengers who were also relying on her to explain what was going on.

Robert looked stricken for a moment. "They must be heading for Ripon." Whatever he was feeling, and it was evident in his eyes, Robert Crawley tried to hide it under a gentlemen's stoicism.

"The factory …" Tom said randomly.

"What are we gonna do?"

They turned to Lady Grantham who was now at the end of her rope. For many long decades, Downton had been home, had been a place of safety from the world. In her times of great stress, she knew she'd have a chance to go home to the quiet of the country. And it was all that kept her going through all of their terror in London. But to know now that the Nazis were now probing so deep, so far into Yorkshire to even target Ripon, to target a part of home. It was all too much for her.

Robert came to his wife's side, but when she looked to him for answers, the older man was ashamed when he could not give them to her. He looked to Tom for help, but, Tom could only look to Mary. It seemed that in their moment of fear, completely exposed for the next mile or so, they'd be in the complete mercy of the German Luftwaffe. All on the train to Downton wondering if there might even be a Downton when they arrive at the station, if they were allowed to arrive at all.

"Hello, Hello, this is Commuter Engine Six, King's Cross via Downton Station, come in, over! This is Commuter Engine Six, King's Cross via Downton Station, we're in trouble, Come in, over!"

They all turned to the desperate voice. Still sitting in his seat was the War Correspondent. The middle aged man in the bowler hat and tweet jacket was soaked in a flop sweat, in his hand was a flask of Irish whiskey and in the other was the military radio he had been monitoring. He was switching from frequency to frequency hoping to find someone that would respond. It seemed like a lost cause till there was a crackle of life in the radio. Suddenly the whole family and other ease droppers suddenly gathered around the man and radio.

" _Commuter Engine Six, this is observation station Echo Two-Seven, we see you."_

"Echo Two-Seven, there's a large number of German Planes on their way to Ripon!" The reporter said hurriedly into the radio.

" _Well done, Engine Six! If we can bloody well see you, don't ya think we can't see the blooming planes, can't we? Now stay on the frequency and off the Com!"_

"Cheeky codger, got a mouth on him ain't he?!" He snapped at the radio. The reporter then turned for support, only to find a host of looks that said that now wasn't the time. "Well … he does!" He took a nip of his flask.

" _Rogue Group, This is Echo Station Two-Seven, a commuter engine has sent out an emergency signal, they're right in the path of enemy bombers, over."_

" _ **Echo Station Two-Seven, this is Rogue Leader, we're on our way!"**_

A familiar voice came over the radio. Mary's heart was in her throat as she immediately turned to her mother who was already staring right at her. It was Atticus. She knew the voice well enough to know it on a radio. Her mind began to race with so many emotions and fears of not only the dire situation, but of the simple fact that if Atticus was leading the sortie it meant that …

"Spitfires!"

"RAF!"

A cheer went up from the car behind them. The children and other passengers stuck their hats and bonnets out of the open windows and waved them in relief and encouragement. Suddenly, skimming the tree canopies of the wooded country road, were fast moving shadows whose engines roared overhead. Looking through their cabin window they saw at least a dozen, olive drab and Kaki fighter planes with the red, white, blue, and yellow roundel painted on their sides and wings. They buzzed the commuter rail as they thunder through the summer sky toward the black cloud of war birds headed for Ripon.

" _ **All Wings report in …"**_

" _ **Rogue Four, standing by."**_

" _ **Rogue Six, standing by."**_

" _ **Lion Two, checking in."**_

" _ **Lion Five, checking in."**_

" _ **Rogue Three, standing by."**_

" _ **Rogue One, standing by."**_

Most of the Rogue group's voices were foreign young men from allied countries, America, Canada, Australia, Poland … but when Rogue One was on the radio, there was no mistaken who the Americanized accent came from. From the moment he came over the radio, Mary grabbed for Tom. Her heart was pounding through her chest and blood was thundering through her ears. She immediately followed the streaking fighters toward overwhelming odds.

" _ **Lion Leader, this is Rogue Leader."**_

" _ **Copy, Rogue Leader."**_

" _ **We'll cut across their formation and draw the escort away from the bombers. The rest is up to you."**_

" _ **Acknowledged."**_

" _ **Don't break formation till the word is given …Call it, Rogue One."**_

" _ **Alright … keep tight, boys."**_

" _ **109's are breaking formation."**_

" _ **Not yet …"**_

" _ **They're in firing range."**_

" _ **Hold your fire!"**_

" _ **Keep coming …"**_

" _ **Here they come!"**_

* * *

" _Leaves from the vine_

 _Falling so slow  
Like fragile tiny shells  
Drifting in the foam  
Little soldier boy says  
"Carry me home"  
Sleeping soldier boy  
Is carried home"_

 _" **Leaves from the Vine" - Mako Iwamatsu**_


	5. Love Farewell

_**Love Farwell**_

" _I thought I heard the colonel crying,  
march brave boys there's no denying,  
cannons roar – drums abeating,  
march brave boys there's no retreating.  
Love farewell."_

" _ **Love Farewell" – John Tams**_

* * *

It was hard to say how much history was on the rolling planes of pure green glens. How many lives started and ended under the shaded canopies of the forests. Battles won and lost on the muddy fields. Great loves proposed and rejected on top of the grassy hills. There was just no knowing how lives changed for the better, for the worse, or maintained in all the grand landscapes that passed below the buzzing modern machines that touched the horizon of an ancient land. Being so far up in the sky, amongst the frozen blue and the wispy white, it put many things into prospective. In the wild and clear ocean of yonder around you, there was nothing but thoughts and memories of a life down below. It makes you wonder, makes you consider the possibility in all this noisy solitude, if this was what heaven was like. An eternity of pondering how insignificant all the plights of the world were. A soul only knowing peace amongst the clouds, forever living in the treasured memories of the loved ones left behind, and those who sit in the cloud right next to you.

In the endless vision of crisscrossing farm fields of yellow, red, green, and gridded squares of stone towns and villages built in the days of antiquity below, it was hard to believe that there was a war going on. That in this lonesome void of blue there was ever a spark of violence, of suffering, of hatred. Down there, they worked, ate, slept, and awoke again with one eye to the sky in fear. Fore they never had the privilege of knowing the freedom, the peace, the wonder of touching the horizon and knowing the pleasure of a different prospective of the world that they tread upon each day. They only knew of the horror that foreign riders of the airwaves brought to their children, their wives, their lives.

It was just one more evil of a man's avarice that spread across the channel.

From below, men in the field, by the fence, on the tractor, looked up when they heard the sound of motors. They all scattered like frightened woodland creatures upon fast moving shadows passing overhead. Mothers grabbed their children and made a rush for the cellars. Old farmers took their caps and hats off in honor. They knew now that the RAF didn't fly patrols. If they saw Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes in the sky, flying as if the devil himself was on their heels, it meant that they were off to battle. The pilots might not ever see them, but it didn't matter, to all the men who survived the trenches, they knew what the right thing to do was in the embodiment of young bravery passing.

Skirting tree lines and twisting golden stalks in the wake of full throttle speeds were a dozen streamline fighters of olive drab and camouflage coloring. They were sleek flying machines made of metal and canvas. They were the hunters for a modern world. They flew in tight formation as they passed over lands that were not native to most of the men that flew them. Brittan was wholly unprepared and ill equipped to fight a war and was only now starting industry. For now, in their most desperate hour, they relied on young men from outer provinces and volunteers from other countries. Nine out of the dozen fighters in the air were such young men. They were Americans pretending to be Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and refugees from a dozen other countries. It was against the law for any American Citizen to break neutrality and fight for another country's army. Seeing the right thing to do in England's greatest need, these young men broke that law. Seeing the irony of it all, being outlaws and rogues for their noble actions, the Air Ministry put these young men together. Led by British born officers with American leanings, the 11th was given the nickname "Rogue Squadron" a name that fit their identity, attitude, and fighting nature since "Eagle Day".

Trailing one behind from the lead was an olive drab Spitfire that seemed somehow out of place from the other planes. There was something different, more than just tally markings under the cockpit, or the unique zipping sound that the rebuilt Merlin made. There was something that stood out, drew attention to it in battle. The paint scheme, the flashiness of the way it moved, the ease and elegance of the way it flew. There was something special about the fighter and the pilot. It was made faster than any of the other planes in the sky. The Mechanic, daughter of a chauffeur and Great Lady of aristocracy, was seemingly bred to never do anything by regulation. To these special adjustments, some would say that it was because the pilot just liked to show off. It was the old comparison that he was too much like his mother. They say it was because he liked to separate himself from others. His plane had to be different, because he was a Crawley, because he was heir to one of the last great estates of Yorkshire. But anyone who knew the speedster racing pilot, the triple ace, knew that his obsession for speed hadn't anything to do with showing off. Every time he went up, George Crawley wasn't racing for fortune and glory …

He was racing against a ghost.

Each time he was in the sky, felt the chill of the horizon, lost in white water vapor, he was brought back to that one winter's day in the village of Downton. Little shoes thundering on frozen stone and jumping over snow forts on his way back to the great house in the distance. Bundled in his granny and mother's scarf and gloves as an impromptu covering for his important mission, the little boy raced down a gravel walkway. The snow drenched branches and wooden bench outside the estate creaking as he thundered by. Even now, in the bite of the chilled air around him, he remembered the white paper bag in a tiny hand. It was the only thing that could save _her_. Yet, it should never have been the responsibility of such a small boy, a child, to be the one to make that run. It should never have been him to make that doomed charge on that fateful quiet and beautiful morning on a snowy Christmas Eve. It was cruelty to let that morning ever live on in his heart and soul when he failed at the impossible task given to him.

That failure lived on each day, each hour, and each moment inside that little boy for fourteen years. After that day, George Crawley never stopped chasing the swirling snow flurries and biting cold of that killing frost. Each time the engine motor came alive, each time he was head to head against a German ME, and each time he was flying through the country side toward danger, he was always neck and neck with a small boy running through the peaceful Christmas snow. And each time, in the adrenaline that rushed through his veins, he hoped beyond hope, that he'd pull ahead this time.

It was the one race he'd never win.

Dark blue eyes were cast down, off the endless skies in front of him, and into his leather gloved palm. There, in hand, was a little glass vial with a white label with faded black lettering. The name "Cora Talbot" was barely visible after fourteen years on the pediatric medicine container. She'd be fifteen years old, beautiful, perfect, not sweet, never sweet, but she'd be his charge, his love, his sister. Henry would be wrapped around her finger, his mother would be worn out, but oh so proud of her angelic daughter. He could see it so clearly, like in some other time and place, she was still here. The "what-ifs" were harder than reality some days. Sometimes it was so easy to know what she would've looked like, would've been like. It was almost as if he could talk to her, like she was sitting right in his lap, with her father's eyes, their mother's haughty smile focused on him. Pushing her long curling tresses of glossy hair back, she tells him how much she's missed him, how much she still loves him. Some men were haunted by the beautiful girls of their past, but for George Crawley …

He was forever haunted by a girl that never was.

" _War Party, dead ahead!"_

Atticus's voice echoed over the radio, catching George off guard for a moment. It was enough to pull him back to the land of the living, and away from what was beyond the pearly gates that was just a shout away. With a shake of his head, he gave one last meaningful glance at the medicine vial, knowing it could be his last time. Somewhere he kissed that angelic girl softly, like he used too every morning and before bed every night, with no amount of certainty that he might see her soon. He quickly stuffed the vial back into the inner-pocket of his double breasted coat of beaten leather.

Looking up to his windshield, dark shapes closed fast. They were long shadows that glimmered against the summer sun. At this distance the German planes could be mistaken for geese or flocks of birds. They flew in impeccable, precise, marshal formations. There was a discipline and effortless ease to the structure of their flying that spoke to hours of training and perfection to their strategies. There was a sense of pride of nationalism to the German soldier, whither he was a Nazi or not. It was sacred to fight for the Motherland and it made the training of the soldiers a matter of dignity and honor. It made them elite. All of these factors made their formations seem almost beautiful …

That was before the killing started.

For every man that flew that afternoon, this was their last chance to do whatever they were going to do before facing the guns. Some prayed, some did a double check of their systems, and some let the edge come rushing through them, priming themselves for a fight. But George Crawley didn't do either. He'd been in too many of these now to know that none of it helped in truth. You did the best you could do, you got lucky, or you didn't. All anyone could do was make sure that they didn't leave anything unsaid before they went into the storm with one good sail.

"Fighter Control, this is Rogue One." He moved his breathing mask over his mouth to talk into his radio.

" _Copy, Rogue One, this is Fighter Control … is there something you need, sir?"_

The man who answered was stiff, tired, and completely confused. The channel was secured for only communication between Squadron Leaders and the ministry men manning the radios at the control room. It was a delicate system, which had layers, and could be thrown into chaos if just one wrench was tossed into the works. It was assumed that everyone knew this, and it was an unspoken rule that only authorized personal was to communicate on the channel. So when a foreign sounding captain, not in charge, called up, it was highly irregular.

"Yeah, tell Corporal Crawley down at the board, that Captain Crawley sends his regards and he fully expects to see her in a white dress when I get back."

George could feel the heat rising from Marigold's cheeks from his cockpit as he switched back to the fighter group's channel with a soft chuckle. He knew the girl with the long, golden, Veronica Lake locks was blushing and trying to contain her shy smile hidden underneath the outrage. But George didn't care, because he knew he had made Marigold smile one last time.

It was their private joke, something that went all the way back to childhood. It was an old bandage on high societal cruelty. In a world in which the bastard born daughter of a Earl's daughter and a magazine owner was more beautiful than over half of the true born debutants, their mothers found horrible ways to mistreat young Marigold. They never missed a chance to tell the girl that she was a blooming rose in a cow field. Sure, she was pretty to look at, but food for cattle none-the-less. No matter how hard her granny, aunt, and mother defended her, the women of the aristocracy all came at her over and over again throughout her life. The beautiful young girl always carried in her heart the cruel insinuations by grown women that no one would ever want her. However, George Crawley, sitting alone with her, under the boardwalk on Coney Island, made a sunset vow that she'd be the Countess of Grantham one day. They were children then. But even as they grew up, knowing the truth and the impossibility of such a task, the boy still maintained his outlandish childhood promise. All in a lifetime's effort to never see Marigold spend a lonely hour in torment of the matriarchs of a dying way of life. Over the years, others, including Sybbie, had poked fun at the absurdity of the old vow. Both had endeared their share of mockery together as recent as his birthday. But even now, on the cusp of this strange day's action, George was still not willing to leave Marigold behind. To leave her without knowledge that his love and promises were real before she'd read an impersonal note from the war office addressed to Lord and Lady Grantham, someday.

Their childhood inside joke might have embarrassed Marigold for now. But if this was to be the end, George knew someday the girl would remember it lovingly for the rest of her days as a final reaffirmation of someone in her life that would always want her.

" _Rogue Group, This is Echo Station Two-Seven, a commuter engine has sent out an emergency signal. They're right in the path of enemy bombers."_

There seemed to be commotion on the channel when George turned back. A rough, country, Yorkshire accent came over the radio in alarm. There was something about it that was familiar on a very generic level. It was George's first taste of Downton in over four years. But more so than familiarity, there was silent knowledge that the alarmed voice was only the first chorus in the opening symphony of chaos that was about to break loose over the fields and forests of a young man's ancestral home.

" _Echo Station Two-Seven, this is Rogue Leader, we're on our way!"_

It was their first intelligence report for the upcoming battle. There had to be a fighter escort with the raiding party. George knew that the Nazi bombers would not waste gas and munitions on something like a commuter rail. But ME pilots wouldn't hesitate to choose a soft target for practice. If the train was calling for help it meant that there was an escort coming with it. He'd been doing this long enough to know that if they were coming this far out of Scandinavia, the 109's will be coming with extra fuel tanks. It'll slow them down, maybe long enough to make this an even fight, were speed meant more than sheer numbers. No one had to be told what maneuver to make as they came on the scene. The Spitfires and Hawkers stayed low to the tree line, they'd engage in a climb to get an under angle, and "Shark" the bombers from below to get at the extra fuel tanks.

The green canopies and tangled snares of the old forest that once saw the red and black riders of noble birth came alive once more. It was a place that had heard the horn of the hunter and howl of the hounds. It was a grand location that played host to the most dazzling and exquisite memories and revelries in the ages of Victoria and Edward. Now in its twisted overgrowth of neglect, the ghost of the great hunt hummed off the bark when the dark woods shook and vibrated in the airstream of the modern world. A dozen fighter planes zoomed overhead, sounding a hunter's horn that was all its own.

Childhood memories had come flooding back of excited emotions and the joys of the whistle noises, when George broke over the tree line and passed over the red commuter. The propellers swirled and whipped the smokestacks as George buzzed the train engine in passing. He could still remember sitting next to his mother on train rides to London, eating sandwiches from the cart, and the indescribable feelings that came from seeing the station and knowing they were back home. It was all very hazy now, but he could still smell his mother's perfume and feel her arms as she carried his sleepy form off the train. Whenever and wherever he saw a passenger train in his many adventures, he still always associated it with the sunny slopes of yesterday, when they were all happy. It was a time when he could remember the softness of his mother's smile as he awoke in the warmth of her loving arms.

" _All wings report in …"_

As the other fighters began listing their readiness, an elegant voice, reverberated in his mind. "Protect the train." The Nurse's words echoed to the captain. It was the last thing the beautiful young woman had told him while he held her close. Her voice had been so soft in his ear, but there was something insistent about her words. There was something important about it that weighed heavily on him. He glanced at the train behind him from over his shoulder. He had wanted to dismiss it as a coincidence, but her matching blue eyes and the pure love in her touch were still fresh on his heart. Something important was on that train. And whatever it was, the young woman was there to make sure he protected it as much as she was there to protect him. The supernatural explanation conjured by his brain of beautiful angels in head scarfs watching over him, troubled him momentarily. George tapped the leather helmet's transceiver over his ear with his index finger as if to push the image of the mystery nurse and Lady Mary from his brain. It was the last thing he needed to be thinking about seconds from the fight.

"Rogue One, standing by." He confirmed into his breathing mask with a flip of a switch on the dash.

" _Lion Leader, this is Rogue Leader."_

" _Copy, Rogue Leader."_

" _We'll cut across their formation and draw the escort away from the bombers. The rest is up to you."_

" _Acknowledged."_

George scoffed away from the radio in disgust. "Idiots" he grunted with a shake of his head. The RAF was falling apart at the seams under the constant pressure of the Luftwaffe and the in-fighting from the officers. With half of the combat pilots looking to change the rules of engagement, tired of being hamstrung by ancient British military tactics, versus new ones that were experienced in battle. Rather than all the fighters in the group going after the bombers at once, British military regulation and overall strategy was to split up the fighting force, in which half went after the bombers, the other tangled with the escort. It was an easy split when there were two separate squadrons flying together. But every veteran pilot knew that the fighters were just a distraction, that the bombers should be the main targets. George had argued it with the high command yesterday, he argued it last week, and he'd been arguing it for months. But the British were still fighting a war twenty-six years ago and would not change their ways, even in the face of oblivion.

The fighter motors began to roar loudly, power began coursing through the machinery as they climbed into the sky. Every engine was cycling heavily as the tight formation of British planes began to accelerate toward the large group of shadows that were becoming clearer by the second. With every moment, the detail on the ME 109 fighters and Heinkel bombers were becoming clearer. At speeds that some say god didn't ever intend for man to go, two sides of a great conflict were on a desperate collision course. One side fought for one man's fascist dream, the other to preserve the last bastion of freedom on the continent. It was a clash of Ideologies tested by gun, plane, and man of wits.

" _Don't break formation till the word is given …"_

Atticus ordered to the pilots over the radio. He was breathless, heart racing, his voice on edge. Or George could assume, since he was feeling the same way as their adversaries were getting closer and closer with every sputtered breath.

" _Rogue One, call it …"_

Major Aldridge passed the next couple of heartbeats over to George. A veteran of the most air battles fought since England entered the war in April. Captain Crawley had developed a touch for the head to head rush in the opening moments of combat. From experience against the best German pilots, a racer's instinct for evasion, and a Major's habit of having a wired shut jaw in moments of extreme anxiety, George Crawley was in command till the bullets started firing.

"Alright, keep tight boys!" George attached his breathing mask over his mouth and nose. The young aviator sounded confident despite everything inside him straining.

From above, German fighters, with rectangular cockpits, began to speed ahead of the tight group of twin engine bombers. If even just a handful of the bombers dropped their payloads, they'd level half of Ripon, and wipe the village of Downton off the map forever. The 109's began taking a downward angle toward them.

" _109's breaking formation!"_

George wanted to snap at Charlie Bryant that he wasn't blind when "Lion Leader" shouted at him over the radio. But instead he frowned determinedly. "Not yet …" He shook his head in a half mutter. He knew that at this point that any other commander would've told his men to break. But at this range it would give the Nazi pilots time to readjust.

He could hear the Messerschmitt engines start to accelerate to attack. It sounded like he was running full speed to ram a hoard of thousands of really pissed off bees. The young man breathed only through his nose, as he opened up the next gear on Sybbie's Merlin, going full throttle at the enemy planes. There was a momentary hesitation from the other pilots, before taking George's lead. Somewhere he could hear the sound of a little boy puffing cold air right next to him on a Christmas morning.

" _They're in firing range!"_

" _Hold your fire!"_

Anxiety was coursing through his veins, a shot of electricity surging through his nerves. He held his breath. "Keep Coming …" the young captain coached amongst the chattered disagreement between Charles and Atticus as the enemy fighters were coming closer.

" _Here they come!"_

He waited and waited as the heartbeats hammered by. His dark blue eyes watched the lead German fighter. It was half observation, part instinct, and part skill, to know when they were going to fire. There was a clock ticking in the young pilots head that rang just as the lead 109 began to tilt for the killing roll. He immediately pulled on the stick.

"BREAK!"

Spitfire and Hawker immediately went in five different directions, moving smoothly as if choreographed for an ice show. Powerful tracer fire from two dozen German twenty millimeter Anti-Aircraft shells cut through the frigid sky where the RAF fighters had once been. The Nazi planes sucked in the trace exhaust of the British as they flew through the empty sky, turning and diving after their illusive enemies that escaped the title wave of black and green canvas. Like a coordinated flock of birds, the Rogue Squadron fighters cut across the Nazi formation and began to turn to get behind the tight concentration of enemy fighters. With curses in German, the Luftwaffe pilots realized that they had been baited into committing, and now in a matter of moments found themselves as the hunted. Quickly they tried to break up before the RAF could strafe them.

" _Keep them from regrouping around the bombers!"_

George grunted with a dozen voices chattering in his ear as he turned his plane sharply. "Rogue Four, Rogue six, watch'em high side." George called, looking to the distance where two Hawkers opened up their 30 caliber cannons at several German planes trying to escape the trap.

" _Copy, Rogue One."_

Turning from right to left, he looked over his shoulder for enemy fighters circling to get behind him. Seeing his tail was clear, he completed his evasive circle and picked up his visual scanning. It was sheer and unadulterated chaos. Groups of three to four ME 109's juked and blotted the sky, being chased by duos of RAF planes. Everywhere around him was the sound of engines roaring above and below him, while the sound of cannon fire whizzed past his cockpit. When he was young, sitting on the edge of a moving boxcar train somewhere on the Mississippi Delta in the morning, or reading a book on the New Orleans docks in the evening, he looked up at the orange and purple sky that reflected clearly off the shimmering bayou, and thought there must have been no end in sight. But now all he felt was claustrophobic, like the sky was so congested, so full, that he couldn't even move without hitting someone else.

After another round of checking his tail, he nosed down and saw in the distance a black and grey camouflage 109 leading two green and yellow planes with black German crosses. The lead fighter had a golden lined swastika of pure black on his back rudder and two rows of roundels below his rectangular cockpit. The Hitler Youth Ace was circling around to try and get back to the bombers who were now being engaged by Charlie Bryant and his section of Hawkers.

The Hunter had found his Fox.

"Rogue Three … Mac, you back there?"

" _Right with you, Rogue One!"_

Malcolm, "Mac" Devane was born in the Outback of Australia. He was big shouldered, broad chested, and was almost too tall to be a pilot of a spitfire. He was a young man who got into some trouble with the local magistrate, and ran to England instead of the hangman's rope. He claimed he had slept with the pretty daughter of the "powdered wig" and she couldn't get enough. But background information sent for by Atticus said that it was an incident involving an Aborigine's mother and child that somehow escaped a theft charge with his help. In their first meeting George and Mac had no love for one another. The Outback Rover disliked the pretty, poster boy, who was heir to an English title and was arrogantly sure of himself. The adventuring racer, disliked the burly, tough talking, roughen who was obsessed with his own penis size, muscles, and sexual prowess.

Things changed at the 11th's mess hall when the Aussie youth, who always had size on his side, had a bit too much to drink. Belligerent, bullying, and obnoxious to the other young men, no one wanted to fight their peer who was built like an ape. But George had enough when the youth was getting too familiar with the airdrome nurses. The ghost of Matthew Crawley haunted the eyes of Lady Sybil when George Crawley confronted the drunken brute about leaving the girls alone. Mac claimed to be impressed that the then Lieutenant "pretty boy" didn't use his rank to hold over him. To which George replied coldly that he didn't need officer's stripes to quell an untrained gorilla escaped from the Circus. All it took was a bully's shove to receive a crippled valet's signature right-cross to his jaw from the future Earl of Grantham. Everyone in the hall stepped back, getting ready for a fight. George had been ready to take it further, when instead, the big youth yanked out the loose tooth, chuckled, and bought the young officer a drink. He claimed that anyone brave enough to not only stand up to him when he was drunk, but knock out a tooth, was tough enough to cover his wing. Since then Mac had been George's wingman and unofficial bodyguard on the ground.

"I've got a well-dressed brown shirt and a couple of run of the mill goose-steppers eight o'clock low. You see them?"

" _I see'em …"_

"Tally-ho!"

" _Copy, Rogue One, Let's get'em!"_

The two Spitfires banked elegantly through a rush of traffic and slowly began to decent at an angle. The young pilot tracked the Hitler Youth and his personal guard from above, stealthily setting up for the kill. The German planes didn't seem to notice the Spitfires coming up on their six o'clock. It seemed proof positive that the Nazi's wing men were brand new pilots right out of Berlin flight school. It was obvious that the Aryan youth, putting on airs, was using the rookie pilots as human shields.

The plane gave no resistance as the cannons on the Spitfire fired their 30 caliber shells into the trailing 109's back portion. Tiny holes spattered back rudder, tail, and cracked through the glass canopy. George sprayed the fighter till a smoke trail erupted. Easing off the throttle, he watched the ME fall from the sky toward the ground below.

The two remaining Luftwaffe fighters were now fully aware of the trailing Spitfires. They moved in unison in an evasive pattern. George matched them stick for stick. The young captain maneuvered in for the kill and open up again with his cannons. He heard the rickety clatter of the holes he punched into the trailing rookie's wings, but it wasn't enough. In one fluid motion the ME's banked right in unison. George followed, trailing fire for a burst or two. It was common knowledge to veterans that ME's couldn't outturn a Spitfire. It was a maneuver that a rookie would try, but not an ace fighter pilot like the lead. There was only one explanation. They were trying to make him commit before they used the number one escape plan in Air Marshal Goring's Luftwaffe playbook for dealing with Spitfires.

"Rogue 3, They're about to dive. When they do, break high right. Stay on the leader when he comes up for air."

" _Copy that, boss. Let's shock these cocksuckers!"_

As if on cue, the ace and his rookie wing man went into a steep dive for the deck.

After five months of near continuous warfare over the skies of France and England. The RAF and the Luftwaffe were all too familiar with each other's weaknesses. Spitfires were faster. 109s had stronger firepower, but couldn't out turn their British enemies. And Spitfires couldn't dive. The metal fighter's Rolls Royce Merlin Engine was fit with a carburetor that when pushed into a high speed dive would sputter and stall out. It had been the death of many RAF pilot in the beginning of the war, even nearly killing George himself in France. When in trouble, German pilots were taught to dive in order to escape a Spitfire. It was a strategy that was flawless, but for one exception …

A single Merlin rebuilt without a carburetor by the hands of the mechanical genius, Sybil Branson.

As the Hitler Youth and rookie pilot dived, George Crawley dove after them. The mystery nurse's coffee slushed in his stomach as he grunted in the pressure of speed. Mac peeled off at a high speed bank and followed from above. The Germans' momentary relaxation was broken by the rattle of shells against aluminum. With the belly of the ME exposed, the RAF Ace riddled the bottom of the teenage pilot's fighter. Several 30 caliber bullets punctured the planes extra fuel tank. The junior pilot's plane went up into a ball of intense blue and orange flames. The German Rookie was incinerated. Too surprised to know he was dead. George throttled down to avoid the explosion, losing sight of the young Nazi he was really after. The black and grey fighter leveled out just in front of the train and stayed low to the woods outside of Yew Tree Farm.

"At the end of the first inning, it's, Crawley 2, Devane 0." George smirked.

" _I call it a foul. Rookies don't count. You gotta get at least four to count as one."_

As Mac drifted away, George angled for another run at the German Ace. But that was when he heard an explosion of high powered cannon fire behind him. He ducked on instinct as the sound of large shells whizzed by his cockpit.

" _Watch it, Rogue One! You've picked up two of them!"_

It was the voice of the Observation Station, Echo, at Yew Tree that shouted at him on the radio. Immediately the young Crawley craned back and saw two green and yellow Messerschmitt's on his five O'clock. They were firing at him, his wide wings snapping and ricketing with stray cannon fire just grazing past them.

He swore, punching the throttle and banking left. He felt as if his stomach and throat was sucked into his back as he tried to pull away from the pair of fighters chasing after him. He had been so focused on chasing the future SS officer, a piece of human garbage that was using uncut first timers as human shields. He hadn't been paying attention. Calling off his wingman, who was supposed to have been watching his back, he was flying completely uncovered. It was a risk for a high profile kill that was now biting him in the back.

"This is Rogue One, someone get over here, and get these assholes off me!" he shouted into his radio.

He banked left and then right, keeping them guessing as they plugged the air in front of him. George got low and tried to turn, but unluckily, these German pilots were no rookies. The lead was putting pressure on George, while the trailer was keeping a firing angle for when George tried to move into a turn. It was the textbook example of getting "the hand" on another pilot.

"Damnit! This is Rogue One, I'm getting torn apart over here!" He shouted.

" _For god sake, Atticus, do something!"_

A woman's voice shouted over the radio, before it went silent. George would've paused if he wasn't busy trying to stay alive. But in his desperation, in his fear of finally being cornered after all these months, he could've sworn he heard … his mother.

"Goddamn it, Mac, where the hell are you?!" the young captain snapped as more shells took a chunk out of the tip of his wing.

" _Echo Station Two-Seven, Where is he?"_

" _Nine O'clock low, a mile out of Yew Tree Farm."_

" _Copy that, I see you Rogue One! Hold them off for a few more seconds!"_

George never thought he'd be happier to hear Atticus Aldridge's voice in his entire life. Though it was more than likely he was imagining things, this being a stranger day than usual, he'd couldn't help but feel an extra special love for Lady Mary than ever before. It was a childlike safety in her momentary presence in a time of stress, even if it was more than likely someone in the squadron that called attention to his plight taking on the ghost in his head.

" _I'm coming right at you, when I say break, try to find a way to turn!"_

"You better make it quick!"

Keeping one eye on the front, he saw in the distance a Spitfire descending at an angle. George kept Atticus in sight as he juked from right to left, then trailing left, before banking right, all in an effort to try to stay unpredictable. He watched Atticus getting closer and closer. Split second instinct told him that there was only way this was going to work.

After the fight with the German Cultural Ministry's Expeditionary Force at Acre, but before joining the air races in Cairo, George had gotten his first taste of flying from working at an air circus outside of Jerusalem. He knew of one trick that might just work, though he had never tried it going this fast before.

Seconds from the two Spitfires meeting, George throttled down. Just as the lead 109 was about to get a clean shot, the RAF Ace, with all the tightness he could muster in his gut and chest, put his plane into an evasive barrel roll. His mind tumbled with his plane, as he swallowed bile as shells whizzed above his head and missed his wings and tail.

" _Now!"_

Suddenly, the young captain slammed down on the throttle and pulled on the stick mid-roll. The Spitfire went into a hard hooking turn. Just as the trailing 109 was about to fire on him, Atticus swooped down. His cannons ripped right into the cockpit of the wingman, tearing the middle aged pilot apart from inside. The bloody canopied plane dropped out of the sky, smashing to bits over several acres of Daisy Mason's fields.

 _The lights gave a golden hue in the soft warmth of a cold night. There was so much quiet stress that had built up in the stately manor, while the cold plutonian hand fettered over its occupants. And there, descending a grand staircase, he saw the most beautiful woman. Her pale, silken, skin shimmered against the soft satin of a purple gown that fit her svelte figure. There was something sad in her lonesome smile, a longing and torment of the deepest of loves in her red tinted eyes. He reached for her, but she brushed passed him, as if he wasn't there. Around them was the sound of a familiar song that echoed off the opulent foyer walls, a song he had heard only minutes before. There, in front of the gramophone, was a man in tux and tails. He had blond, slicked back, hair and seemed to be listening to the song. The words and music seemed to filter through his mind such heavy topics that weighed him down. But it all seemed to dissolve once he saw the beautiful woman. It was seldom in a lifetime, in a thousand of them, that someone looked at you the way the man looked at the pale beauty. His blue eyes were alight, his face frozen in a terrible pain of her being in his gaze, a pain of so many emotions that tore him apart. He was unmade by her very presence in his soul. As she approached him, she was silent, placing silky black gloved hands behind her back and tilting her head coyly. Their stare lasted only a moment in a locked stalemate of longing. Then he offered her his hands and they came together to dance to an already half-finished song._

" _Can you manage without your stick?"_

" _You are my stick …"_

 _The dark haired woman smirked in loving amusement as they danced. Seeing them together brought a sense of satisfaction, of completion. Even a young hero, born into tragedy, found great consolation in knowing that the two people who created a soul, who breathed life into him, did so out of the truest of loves. Seeing them together, dancing in the foyer, maybe for years, maybe forever, there was never a more perfect, tragic, and loving pair of souls bound together by destiny._

" _The stick!"_

 _He had been too distracted to notice that someone was talking to him. He focused to notice the doomed lovers of long ago had stopped dancing. Both crystal and dark eyes were resting on him, the pale woman and the dapper man in one another's arms. There was a rush of adrenaline and his insides tightened suddenly. The beautiful woman looked alarmed for him, the man was worried._

" _My Darling, please, the stick!" She said to him determinedly._

" _George …" The blond haired man called. Light and dark blue eyes met for the first time in twenty years. "George, my dearest chap, the stick!" He reminded him with all the patience that a worried but calmed father could have._

" _The stick?"_

" _George, luv, the stick!" The woman begged, clutching her lover's jacket._

Suddenly, the young pilot shook his head. The lit foyer of Downton dissolved in a flash. George Crawley suddenly got a view of the chaos of the skies over the county of Grantham from behind a class canopy. He had, for a split second, passed out from the high speed barrel roll that turned into a hard turn.

Gaining his wits about him, the young captain, gave a hard blink. His head on a swivel for a moment till the combined voices of the lovers echoed in his head. He turned to find that he was still pulling on the control stick, still in the middle of a hard hook. In fact he had broken from his nearly dozing state, to realize that he had turned so hard and so fast that he had made the complete loop nearly behind the Messerschmitt that had been chasing him initially.

The veteran German pilot saw what was about to happen and tried to bank out of the way. But the slingshot speed of the RAF Ace's maneuver was too fast to outrun. The 109 ended up banking right into the Spitfire's cannon fire. There was crashing noise that came from the front of the German fighter, as smoke began to billow from behind the propellers. Like an unwieldy kite on a gusty day, the Messerschmitt jerked and twisted uncontrollably as it fell to earth.

Hearing another engine, George looked behind him, and then exhaled a sigh of relief. The figure of Atticus's fighter had pulled up behind him to cover his wing. "Thanks, Atticus." There was a weary shock to his voice.

" _One of these days you're gonna listen to me."_

George smirked. "Yeah, one of these days …" He chuckled with mirth. "What happened to keeping your distance, today?" He prodded sarcastically.

" _Somebody is gotta run that old …"_

 **RATATATATA!**

 **BOOM!**

While George was being pursued by twin 109's, enlisted by the Nazi Ace, a young man who had always been adept at getting others to help him slip out of trouble, the Aryan aristocrat had swung around. Mac had been stalking the German plane and, as instructed, pursued him when he came up from air. However, while very good, Mac was not George Crawley, and certainly not the equal of the Nazi pilot in his chase. Under a hail of the Australian's cannon fire, the ME disappeared into the traffic and chaos amongst the clouds. Losing his hunter, the Nazi aviator hooked back in pursuit of the RAF Ace, and an old Turkish bounty.

When George looked back, the black and grey ME, trimmed in gold, made a strafing run at Atticus, shredding him to bits. But before he could even react, before either one of them could react, the fire chewed right through the back section of Atticus Aldridge's fighter. The force of the firepower ripping through the aluminum and completely cut the plane in two. There was nothing that George Crawley could do as he watched helplessly as his relative careened to the ground below.

"ATTICUS!"

George roared watching the Spitfire hit the Mason barn, nose first. The explosion blew away the ancient structure completely in a great destructive fireball. Atticus Aldridge would forever haunt his wife's family with his demise. Unknown to him, Mary, Tom, Robert, and Cora all watched in abject horror as the front of his plane crashed in sight of their compartment. They all got the oncoming view of the falling plane and explosion as the train rushed by the gruesome sight.

Blue eyes were wide saucers, chest heaving, as George ventilated into his breathing mask. He craned his head back to the ruins of the Mason barn where tiny figures were already rushing toward it with pails of water. He saw flashes of moments in childhood, memories of a happy, wild, blond girl dancing with her husband on New Year's Eve. How proud she was of him for just being him, proud of how happy he had made her, proud of the children their love had created. The quiet moments as a world afire settled into night over the last hard months, sitting alone in the ready room with a perfumed letter and a picture of his 'Wild Rose'. Always did he look at the picture with a weary reverence for all the things she had put him through, knowing that with willingness, he'd do it all over again, just for her. That was what was lost in this moment. Now all that was left of a good man lay in a crater smothered in flames that flickered its soul to the summer winds.

From close by George saw the Hitler Youth glide away toward the battle in the clouds. All the fond memories of a family man echo through his mind as he watched the killer speed away. The thoughts, the imaginings of that brainwashed monster painting one more roundels under his fancy fighter's cockpit, taking all that the man meant to so many people and degrading him to a trophy tally … it was not an option. The sheer idea drove George over the edge. From somewhere deep inside all men in war, a dark madness seeped into his heart. His granny and aunt's eyes became sharp and filled with hatred.

He was going to nail the Nazi bastard's hide to the wall if it was the last thing he'd do.

Pistons and belts cranked and buzzed in the power of moving machinery as the custom fighter was pushed into full throttle. Buzzing the train with an explosion of noise, George climbed for the clouds after the young Aryan. His heart was racing, his teeth were clenched, and his mind was a narrow tunnel of all the dark things that rage and insanity project amongst the clamor of death. Captain Crawley fired as soon as he was in range. The 30 Caliber burst seemed to take the Hitler Youth by surprised. But seeing the triple row of black crosses and swastikas under the cockpit …

The young Nazi smirked arrogantly.


	6. Promontory

**Promontory**

" _The Young Aviator lay dying  
And as 'neath the wreckage he lay,  
To the mechanics around him  
These bold words he did say._

 _Two valve springs you'll find in my stomach,  
Three spark plugs are safe in my lung,  
The prop is in splinters inside me,  
To my fingers the joy-stick has clung._

 _Take the cylinders out of my kidneys  
The connecting rod out of my brain  
From the small of my back take the crankshaft  
And assemble the engine again."_

 _ **-The Aviator**_

* * *

When people would say "War has come to Downton" it was purely figurative. The men enlist for the wars of the Empire, the 'Big House' becoming a hospital, the loss of life from a friend and neighbor at some horrible place with a foreign name. That was what they had meant. The last time war had touched the village was in the passing of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and his Jacobite Army during the '45. The last battle fought in the county was during the "War of Roses". It was a battle in which the Crawley's had won their title. In the centuries past, the peaceful farming village had grown quite sleepier, the modern world creeping slowly, if ever at all. All the youth of the county, whether Noble blooded, or common as common got, swore that nothing exciting ever happened … till it did.

The two customized fighters crisscrossed, twisted, and circled one another through the smoke trails across the Yorkshire sky. It was a grudge match between two young men born to famous aristocratic names. One an attention seeker, looking for fame, glory, and Turkish gold. The other a racer with a chip on his shoulder, trapped between hatred for his family name and honor to the ones he loved. The two were reflections of one another from a different country, upbringing, and beliefs. Yet, the best at what they did. Any other pilot would've been dead in a dog fight like this, a dog fight of the likes never to be seen again. From the observation station, the spotters watched on in awe, and later spread the account to newspapers that would engage every schoolboy, farmer, and great Lord across battle lines. They're imaginations captured by the eye witness account of that one amazing afternoon in the County of Grantham, the tale of the last great duel between the noble blooded sons of aristocracy. It was the Earl of Grantham's Heir versus a young Austrian Count that was the toast of all the ballrooms across the Third Reich. The two battling youths' choice of weapons was not blade, pistol, or fist, but the deadliest of them all … modern machinery.

The sentiment and romanticism of the Peerage's last hurrah, their high water mark before the end, belonging to the Crawley family in a battle to save the Empire would bring a tear to Charles Carson's eye.

The Spitfire's Browning cannons ripped a chunk out of the ME's back rudder. The Austrian Count sneered. Sweat began pouring down his brow. Five minutes was an eternity for dueling planes, a hellish mental strain. It was becoming all too clear that on this day the young, foreign, aristocrat had bit off more than he could chew with the RAF Ace who was out for his blood at all costs.

" _Rogue Leader, this is Fighter Control, come in."_

George ignored the chatter on the radio. All he needed was just twenty more seconds and the goose-stepping goon was his. The two fighters broke left and George brought down the hammer again, tearing more parts off the custom fighter. With the extra fuel tank, blind spot, and now damage to his maneuverability, the young captain needed one more mistake to finish it.

" _Rogue Leader, this is Fighter Control, come in!"_

In his rush for revenge, clouded by hatred and rage, George had forgotten the chain of command. He had forgotten that he was even in a war. All he knew was that he'd die before he'd let Atticus be another Jewish trophy on a Nazi plane. But at the call sign that pierced through the shade of darkness on his heart, he was reminded of his responsibilities.

" _Rogue Leader, this is …"_

"Damnit, what?!" he snapped into his radio.

" _Bombers are ten miles in range of Ripon Air Defense. You are instructed to stop that raiding party post haste!"_

"What do you think we're up here doing, sniffing their crotch?" He snapped.

" _Give me your rank and name, sir. I believe a report is …"_

"Brigadier General Tom Branson."

" _I say …"_

George turned off control's channel. A leather clad hand hovered over the throttle in indecision. He wanted with all his heart to continue the fight with the Hitler Youth. But once again he felt the shackles of responsibility fall on him. With Atticus dead, George was now Squadron Leader. It tore him between whether he wanted personal justice for his family, or if he had to put all of it aside for the mission at hand. He knew what his grandfather would advise, what his Uncle Tom would say, and more importantly, what his father would've done. But the whole point of his life was to get away from all that, to be his own man. Thus, the question stood …

What would George Crawley do?

"Rogue group, this is Rogue One … I'm assuming command."

Throttling down, George watched in anger as the Nazi Ace's Messerschmitt banked and skittered away out of range. With a primal snarl he turned his attention to the dozens of bombers that were tightly spaced in the distance. He saw Charlie Bryant's Hawkers harass, slide up, tap, and retreat under gunner fire. A bitterness rose inside George at what the stuffy jerk had been doing while George's men were dying … which was basically nothing.

"I've just about had enough of this shit."

He announced over the radio for Rogue Squadron, observers, and first class train occupants to hear. If he was in command, then it was his show and his rules. It was the one thing that all the other commands at the airdrome and field feared. George Crawley, a cowboy pilot, in command of a squadron of cowboys.

"Rogue group, get the escort to follow you and engage those bombers at point blank!" The young captain pulled on the stick, turning his Spitfire toward the tight marshal formations in the distance.

For most of the trip across the North Sea, the German bomber crews had nothing better to do. It was a long trip over a vast ocean. It was supposed to have been a surprise attack on a mostly undefended Northern England. Before leaving, they had been told that the hardest part of the raid would be not getting lost in finding the industrial towns of Ripon and Thirsk. The most action they had seen so far on this time sensitive mission was when they broke with the main group. So far it seemed that High Command had been right. Though there was an intense fight for the escort, the planes that came for them were few and not aggressive. The Nazi bombers seemingly rolled on toward the rural heart of Industrial Yorkshire like a juggernaut, their gunners merrily swatting at "Lion Group" like buzzing flies. But as the navigators were directing the bomber group to stand ready, the lead German captain looked up … and cursed.

Spitfires and Hawkers of what was left of Rogue Group were now streaking toward them, head to head, at full speed. The bomber escort was in pursuit, pushing their speed as far as they dared. It looked like a very dangerous and desperate game of chicken, one in which the RAF was not budging, and the Nazi bombers could not avoid in such tight spacing. Losing the insane race toward the oncoming title wave of green and black, the ME's began to fire at the much faster Spitfires that were almost out of range of the accuracy of their cannon.

The six remaining planes of Rogue Squadron fired at the bombers. The first row of Heinkel rattled, clanked, and bent at the Browning machine guns. It was made worse from the enfilade fire of their escort's own Anti-Aircraft rounds that missed their mark and found the front of their planes.

"Watch the Crossfire, boys!"

German captains were screaming at the nose gunners to fire, for the other bombers to break formation so they could move out of the way. They covered their faces, closed their eyes, or remained in passive shock as the RAF fighters buzzed their cockpits firing right into them. Pilots, Co-pilots, and Nose Gunners were torn apart in the oncoming wave of pointblank cannon fire from adversary and guardian alike. Explosions and smoke trails choked out the tight formations and made visibility nearly impossible for gunners.

George didn't flinch as he cut a swath into the lead bomber. His cannon fire ripped through the front. He didn't know the extent of the damage, but he saw the sparks of shell ricochets bounce around the cockpit, and got close enough to see the ranking leader of the German raiders had dark eyes that would remain unblinking as he slumped in his captain's chair. The Ace's plane raced inches from the top of the body of the lead bomber, before navigating around the tail. He fired again, point blank into the nose of the back-up Nazi plane. The rapid cannon fire shattered the glass protection of the gunner. George just missed the soldier inside the nose who fell out and disappeared with a scream into the wild blue yonder. He twisted his plane right, just under the bomber wing, and punched the throttle under the low bridge. Suddenly a chill ran down his spine as something scraped behind him. The metal against metal contact was like nails on a chalkboard. It was followed by a large concussive explosion that cracked his neck. He turned to find that the Messerschmitt that had been chasing him had run right through the bomber's wing. Sinking from the sky, the twin engine plane crashed into another bomber on its lower left. The collision of the hundreds of pounds of explosives met with a tremendous force. The jagged shrapnel sprayed from the giant fire ball, shredded through surrounding bombers. It was a rippled domino effect that caused trails of black smoke from damaged engines and killing crew members near windows.

"Wooh!" George let out pent up anxiety, fear, and adrenaline making it clear to the other side of the formation.

As RAF planes raced through the "Briar Patch" of the bomber formations, the initial attack run was nothing ever experienced before. It was like flying into a scrap metal grinder. British fighters streaked through the narrow places of the German formations, firing bursts into the bombers they passed. The ME's that followed their RAF enemies in pursuit found themselves walking right into a buzz saw. Their missed spreads contributing to the damage of their own bombers, while trailing gunner fire ripped into their sides and tails. Within minutes half of the Nazi bomber squadron was damaged. The planes streaking through tight spaces, crossing each other by inches, combined with crossfire of gunners, RAF, and 109's, was a level of anarchy that no one was prepared for. From below it looked like an out of control feeding frenzy of metal sharks, circling, twirling, diving, and in horror, crashing head to head into one another.

George wheeled his fighter around to set up for his next run. "Lion Leader, this is Rogue Leader." The young captain called.

" _Rogue One, what happened to Major Aldridge?"_

The youth narrowed his eyes at the mention of a fresh wound by the last person in the world he wanted to talk too. "That is a subject of a very sad and macabre letter I'll be writing his wife tonight." He retorted in annoyance.

" _Right …"_

For his commendation, Charles Bryant sounded genuinely mournful of the loss. Whatever Bryant had thought of Atticus's wife's family and maybe even his faith, there was no denying that he was a gentlemen and a fair man. If there was someone that he could've respected that was linked to the Crawley family, it was Atticus Aldridge.

"Lion Leader, keep the bombers penned! Don't let them get any spacing!"

" _This isn't Dunkirk, Captain! You don't give me or my men orders."_

"Oh, don't you have anything better to do today, Snuffy?" George replied with a sarcastic tone against the indignant attitude of his peer. For a moment one might have mistaken Lady Mary in the cockpit, rather than her son.

If there was a time and place for a fight like this, right now was not it. It was one of the many things that George Crawley couldn't stand about the British Army, the ego, the properness of it. They had separate commands that could never meet in the middle. With no ranking officer, they might as well have been two bickering school boys in the yard.

" _Like I said … my men, my orders,_ _ **Crawley**_ _!_

There was an anger that went deep down, that showed a rotted core at its most fundamental level. All of it was revealed in the way the man said a simple last name. It was apparent that Charles Bryant's inner rage and darkest hatred was not reserved for his country's enemies, the very antithesis of its values. It was reserved for a noble family that he'd rather see burn in Nazi fires, than work with to save his own people.

"Then I'll see you in hell!" George snarled angrily. "Rogue four, this is Rogue One." He changed gears quickly.

" _Copy."_

"Kristoff, follow me on my next run, I'm going after the coordinating bomber."

" _Covering you, Rogue One."_

The Jewish Viking's Hawker Hurricane spun into position behind the speeding Spitfire. With the lead bomber damaged beyond repair, desperately trying to get away, the rest of the bomber group was being held together by one Heinkel in particular. The coordinating bomber's job was to make sure that the group didn't run into one another and stayed in formation. The leader and the coordinator were the twin pillars of keeping them together. With the lead bomber and second in-command already crippled, the formation and mission rested on the shoulders of a lone twin engine plane that had friendly fire holes punched into its side. Going after the twin pillars of the Luftwaffe was done on a wing and a prayer. Without Captain Bryant's help, and RAF fighters dropping fast, it was the counties only hope that destroying the foundation of the bomber group's chain of command would send them on the run.

The two RAF fighters swung around and set for the kill. Their target was positioned squarely on the rear of the formation. The Spitfire took the lead, the Hawker trailing. "Hang back, Rogue Four, I'll set him up and you close." George ordered.

Seeing the incoming British fighters, the German tail gunner alerted his captain. Tracer machine gun fire arced into the air as the gunner attempted to hold off the incoming planes. The Spitfire shimmied as shells whizzed by. Browning cannons opened fire, punching holes into the bombers body and wings. But instead of buzzing overhead, George purposefully pulled off, drawing fire. Meanwhile the Hawker rolled into position and opened up for a second round. The one two punch of combined fire of both fighters caused black smoke to start spewing from the right engine. Hope sprung eternal in the breast of Downton's Heir as he watched the bomber's engine catch on fire. As the plane sank from the sky, figures parachuted out.

It was the last straw.

All the bombers in the Nazi war party were either shot down or damaged critically. They had no command structure left to coordinate the air raid, or a lead bomber to take cue from. They were caught in a vicious, chaotic, and deadly crossfire from friends and foe. They were also completely unnerved by the sudden extreme aggression of the RAF. Left alone, being cut to bits in a meat grinder, over a foreign land, the surviving crews didn't see any point in their suicide mission over rural Yorkshire. The group broke up into cloud cover and turned back for the coast lines of Scandinavia.

George breathed the slightest sigh of relief, when a scream from a group of people echoed over the radio. He frowned deeply, unsure what was going on with the channel.

" _Rogue Leader, this is Observation Station, Echo Two-Seven!"_

"Copy, Echo Station."

" _A group of 109's has broken off and going after the commuter rail."_

Quickly, the young captain looked down and saw the faint figures of shadows circling down below the clouds like buzzards. He knew it was what was left of the Nazi escort trying to cover for the bombers. They were going after civilians in order to draw the RAF fighters away. After all the death that had gone on that day, all the anger, hatred, and suffering of the battle in the heavens …

It was the least human action in war George had seen in some years.

Suddenly he was standing on a hillside in Spain. The sound of German bombers overhead, he could still see the glow of the burning city of Guernica. See the massacre of citizens. Horse's stampeding from their stables, their coats on fire, burning alive as they raced through the fiery streets. There were blackened bones of mothers fused together and still clutching tiny skeletal remains of … and all the while a voice kept echoing in his head. She was soft, kind, and loving, but direct. Protect the train. Protect the train. Protect the train …

"Rogue Group, this is Rogue One, I need a volunteer to cover while I do something incredibly stupid." George spoke candidly.

" _You rang, Rogue One?"_

The squadron leader smirked at the Australian voice. "It's gonna be really rough, I didn't want to assume you'd take me up, Mac." He tried to deter him.

" _Ah, you had me at incredibly stupid, Boss."_

"Rogue four, this is Rogue One."

" _Copy, Rogue One."_

"Kristoff, get the boys outta here!"

" _Yes, sir …"_

George thought of the dozen fighters that had left the airfield. Now he watched as a sparse remnant escaped. Out of nine planes in Rogue Squadron that went out on the sortie, only four were left, and before it was over there might be only two. He felt the blow come savagely when he came to realize that his entire command had been wiped out. They had saved Ripon, Thirsk, and the village of Downton, but at the great cost of his aggressive tactics. By the end of the day George Crawley was a captain over just three fighters. He'd spend the rest of his life brooding this day, if he came through it.

"Rogue 3, stay low, hug the tree line."

" _Following your lead."_

The two Spitfires dropped out of the clouds, angling their approach without diving. The trees rustled and surrendered leaves to the force of the passing fighters' airstream. They were unseen as they thundered through the sky toward the railroad track in the distance. From their vantage point, the two RAF pilots saw that there was at least half a dozen 109's buzzing through the area, not targeting anything. Only one of the German ME's was chasing the commuter train. He was firing off shots that impacted next to the locomotive and tore through the second class seating. But he wasn't after the engine. Immediately George knew that this was a trap meant to draw out the remaining, outnumbered, RAF fighters.

"Protecting the train is priority." George said knowing that Mac was probably seeing just the kind of mess he just volunteered to get into.

" _Yeah, I figured."_

There was a long pause between the two young men, finality, reality, or maybe even something a little less noble like regret passed through them. Both knew that two against six were nearly impossible odds at this stage.

"I, uh, I appreciate you doing this, Mac." George felt anxiety in his chest, a pang of fear falling over him as he stared at the little Great Dame with the bejeweled collar pinned next to his gages. Somehow he knew this was it, the closest he's ever been to the end. He knew the odds, the likelihood of success.

" _If we survive this, Boss, you think you could tell Sybil that this was my idea. I might finally get a date outta this, if she thinks I talk you into this noble, gallant, shit we're about to do."_

George chuckled despite everything. "You never know when to give up don't you?" He asked fondly.

" _Never …"_

There was something sad about George's wilted smile. "I'll put in a good word." He promised with resignation. His mind filled with thoughts of a best friend, a sister, waiting all alone for a pilot that would never come home.

" _All I'm asking, Boss."_

With one last emotional breath George blew out all his fear and regret. When he closed his eyes he was still neck and neck with a small boy running down the graveled path covered in ice. In his hand was a white bag from the hospital. He felt a burst of energy as he matched him leg for leg in the race they were locked in … forever.

"Let's go make an entrance."

Both Merlin motors cranked high, zooming over the old forest road in preparation for attack. The ME chasing the train was angling for a killing shot. The fighter had been strafing the compartment cars, 20 millimeter shells ripping through the roof, squeezing out sounds of frightened refugee children screaming. Suddenly the sky was lit by tracer fire. Browning cannons opened fire on the green and yellow Messerschmitt, punching gaping holes through the side of the plane. Canvas and Aluminum shredded like wrapping paper under double cannons. The 109 caught fire, spinning out of control, and finally slamming into a large swampy creak just outside the tree line.

The two Spitfires buzzed overhead to a ragged cheer from children and nobility alike on the train. For a long desperate moment, the occupants thought they had been abandoned to fend for themselves. So as they saw the shot up, but still flying RAF fighters hold parallel to the train over the woods in the distance, there was relief and thanks for all on the train.

"Commuter Engine, this is Rogue Leader!" George called checking behind him to see the German fighters forming up in the distance to spring the trap. There was a long pause from the radio response on the other end. "Goddamnit, Commuter Engine, this is Rogue Leader, we don't have time for this shit!" He called angrily into the radio at what he perceived to be the engineer. Finally, when cursing was added to the angry demands to be answered, the radio crackled.

" _Rogue Leader, this is Lord Leftenant Grantham …"_

A Stern, official and stiff voice, encompassing centuries of English Aristocracy and gentlemanly stature, came over the radio. It was a voice that the young captain would know anywhere. His heart sank into his stomach. He was reminded of the thunder and lightning of the last time they had spoken, the last time they had seen one another. He remembered seeing something die inside the eyes of the old man as the young pilot had left for good. George Crawley felt a shock of sadness and shame of his very soul when he heard the voice of his grandfather over the radio.

"I'm so, so, sorry, sir."

There was more meaning to the words than anyone might have known. It was more than an apology between a captain and a higher ranking ceremonial officer. It was something that came from a heart filled with hurt and regret, a soul weighed down by the heated words that were never made right. It was a sorrowful emotion that could not be spoken of when faced against the guns with only moments to do and say everything you had always needed too before you never could again. And yet it was all he could think of to say.

" _My dear chap … it is most very, quite alright, quite alright indeed …"_

A single tear fell from dark blue eyes, hearing the love, the very soul of forgiveness in the soft tone the stern old man spoke with over the radio. From inside the train, he'd never quite know how much emotion was in the tired eyes of Robert Crawley as his loving wife held him tightly in tears. George checked behind him and saw the German planes coming.

"Donk … Your Lordship …" He corrected himself quickly, clearing his throat of emotion. "Ahh, when you get to the south woods, have the Engineer make a full stop." His tone went to hardened seriousness, despite clear fighting off of strong feelings. "Get everyone off the train and hide in the woods … we'll draw them off." He instructed.

" _The tracks are surrounded by a moat of filthy water here. There are ladies on this train, sir!"_

All the warmth and forgiveness between the two men dwindled. And before they knew it, they went right back to where they left off. Cora Crawley rolled her eyes to the sky, while Lord Grantham and his Heir were at one another's throat again. Sometime in the final days before George had left for good, Lord Grantham turned to his wife in bed. There he wondered how their daughter Sybil cheated the Grim Reaper and convinced Mary to give birth to her own creature that would forever carry on her endless fight against her long suffering papa.

"Which would you rather be doing, picking Leeches out of Granny's knickers or Shrapnel? It's your choice, Donk, your choice!" George shouted into the radio in unfathomable irritation at the irrationality of the late Peerage. There was hardly a group of people on earth who'd rather die on a fiery train than get their precious high born women dirty. Cora ripped the radio out of her husband's hand, while the man seemed thoughtfully considering of his grandson's logic with an absent head tilt.

" _The point is conceded, darling. Your Mother and Uncle Tom are already on their way to the Engineers."_

"Mom …" George said absently. He was taken back to the moments before Atticus's death, when he thought he heard her voice on the radio. Then, he thought that the wires in his brain had been crossed. But now, he knew that it actually was his mother who had saved his life.

" _Here they come!"_

When the Australian voice came over the radio in alarm, the young captain turned. There were at least five German planes coming at them high side. Blue eyes narrowed in a deep hatred when he saw that they were led by a Nazi fighter of black and grey camouflage with a swastika trimmed in gold. It would seem that the Austrian Count would not leave the County of Grantham so easily without the assurance of a Princess's bounty.

"We got five on our six, Rogue 3, stay low!"

The train was all but forgotten as the German fighter cannons tore through the perfect summer air. Tracer rounds sprayed at the escaping Spitfires that broke left out of the way and went full throttle, their superior speed keeping them just out of range.

" _What's the plan, Boss?!"_

"Uh …"

George looked back as anti-aircraft shells whizzed by. He hadn't thought this far ahead. When he had made the decision to protect the train, it was motivated by the soft voice of his lovely mystery nurse's parting words. Now that they were in full action, he hadn't really thought about what the next move was.

" _I knew it …"_

"Hey, you want me to list off all the stupid ideas you've had in the last month?!"

" _I am stupid … It's part of the charm. You're the one who's supposed to have the plans, Pretty Boy!"_

George checked the fuel gage, tapping it worriedly. He'd burned a lot of fuel with his circus stunt flying during the fight and he was dangerously close to threading the needle to the warning light. He imagined that if he was close to done, than the German fighters who had crossed the North Sea, also had to be worried about getting home at this point.

"Let's split'em up, Mac." The youth checked to see if they were still back there. "Run circles and see who wants to go home and who wants to go to the stockades." He flipped a switch on the dash.

" _Better than nothing I suppose."_

"Break right, lead them to Thirsk and I'll take'em for a country stroll."

" _She'll be apples, Crawley."_

"Good Luck, Mac."

There was an unspoken chemistry to the way the two fighters split flawlessly. The Australian turned to the right and the Racer going to the left. The chasing Nazi 109's broke up under the Austrian Count's orders. Two of the 109's broke to go after Mac, as directed. But for the Hitler Youth, he'd not give up the chase for glory. With two other like-minded young pilots, promised a split in the fortune, they went after the Heir of Downton. When George checked and saw his adversary leading the fighters there was something personal in the hateful spark in his eyes.

"Come and get me you inbred, goose-stepping, son of a bitch!"

Grazing herds of sheep bleated in fear and scattered off the high hills of the green country as a Spitfire roared just over the peak, kicking up blades of grass and blowing white wool of animal coats in disarray. With the shackles of responsibility that came with an army ranking thrown off, as well as being over his own lands, It gave the young Crawley license to be as reckless and unconventional as he usually was when flying in a race. Nazi strafing threw clumps of earth high into the air, their shells trailed exploding dirt and grass ahead of the fighter.

"Fighter Control, This is Rogue Leader!"

" _Copy Rogue Leader, this is Fighter Control."_

"Tell Thirsk and Ripon Air Defense to run out the guns, **now**!"

Large shells tore through dirt roads making strange warped noises, kicking up trails in pursuit of the speedster RAF Ace. People who lived in the outlining cottages outside the town, who had just come out of cellars after a radio bulletin, immediately ran for cover again. Cars swerved out of the way of strafing trails and low flying fighter planes that were charging toward the small industrial town of Ripon.

Following the main road was dangerous for collateral damage, but the racer knew that the outskirts of the town was where the Air Defense weapons would be deployed. In the distance he saw men in tin hats and mustaches rushing, half uniformed, for sandbag bunkers. He began elevating his angle, as men began loading Anti-Aircraft shells into their artillery.

 **CRACK!**

 **CRACK!**

Just as the Spitfire rushed overhead, the Air Defense began firing at the trailing 109s. Black clouds exploded with shrapnel in front and under German Planes. While an Anti-Aircraft gun flung large caliber shells at the low flying pilots. They were, by far, not the southern gunners who had seen non-stop action since the start of summer. But the Ripon shooters were not by any stretch incompetent. Tracking the buzzing enemy planes, one of their rail-guns ripped a shell right into the drag Nazi fighter's tail. Trailing smoke and spinning out of control, the 109 crashed into a courtyard of brick where the county elections were once counted.

Cars honked, women screamed, and unattended young boys ran out on the street to watch as the planes passed. The RAF fighter was only yards above the cobble stone streets of Ripon, using the buildings and alleyways as cover. Trails of strafing ricocheted off ancient stone as the German pilots weaved and twisted out of the way of old industrial buildings. Every man in the air had been heavily engaged during Eagle Day, and knew how to fly in urban warfare. But Ripon was not the posh streets of Belgrave Square in London were George Crawley had become a Triple Ace. The buildings were not tall, the streets were wider, and occasionally the aluminum on the Nazi 109s snapped as an old shop owner or office manager stuck an ancient gun out a window and fired at the oncoming invaders.

Slingshoting past the tall, brick, engine factory, George made for a second pass at the Air Defense bunkers. Mothers ran out on the street and grabbed their boys. They pulled them out of the way of oncoming strafing runs down the street while the planes thundered in the opposite direction this time. Banking and dipping between the buildings, the Spitfire juked back out of the city. The gunners were busy trying to turn the heavy weapons around when the Nazi Pilots dove on the defenders. High powered cannons went through the sandbag bunkers tearing equipment, fortification, and men, to pieces. George squeezed his eyes shut in guilt and anger. He cursed inwardly at his enemy.

There was no sign of quit from the pursuit of the promised bounty on top of the young heir's head. Leaving Ripon the same way they had come, George was running out of options for cover. The youth punched the throttle, braking left under a hail of cannon fire. He hugged familiar trees closely, wearily trying to stay in the Messerschmitt's blind spot. His fuel was running low, the Aryan poster boy was starting to get a hand on him, and he had no position to turn the tables on them. He had only one option left …

And that was the Downton gun.

"I think it might look stylish …"

"I don't think they care about being stylish, M'lady."

"Why not? It's been twenty-one years since the last war. I think they'd love an update."

"It's a uniform, Rose, not a costume for a party. As long as it's not grey and black, I think the ministry doesn't care what everyone looks like."

"Well they should … I certainly do. Plus, there's some patriotic pride in having our boys look the best, isn't there?"

"You mean Atticus looking the best."

"Well, Atticus looks good in everything, darling … but then Atticus isn't everyone, is he?"

Lady Edith Crawley, Marchioness of Hexham, rolled her eyes. She sat behind the sandbag bunker next to the Anti-Aircraft gun. A blue, wide-brim, tin helmet was on her head, a flak vest over her dress. Next to her, Rose Aldridge was fiddling with her helmet. The two golden haired women in silk sun dresses, pearls, and heels, looked as if they were attending a Garden Party rather than manning a defensive position. The only one who looked even partially prepared for battle was Downton Abbey's Butler, Thomas Barrow. He wore his tin hat well, his vest fit over his livery, and his sad eyes were on the horizon.

The British Government at the brink of war with Nazi Germany was completely underequipped. There were less than three hundred Anti-Aircraft guns on the whole of the Isle of Britain. With most of them deployed to the south, the rural Yorkshire villages and small towns were sparsely equipped for defense. The belief was that the RAF in the south would stop any raiders from coming this far north. So when Lord Grantham had requested for a gun to defend the village, the decision was to place it right on the hill top on the estate grounds. Thus, it meant that it was the duty of the members of the household to be at the ready at all times to man their 'Battle Stations'. It was usually a job that Lord Grantham and his valet, John Bates, would take up. The two men would trade off shifts with an assorted Footmen and the Gardner. Every once in a while, in the night, Lady Grantham would join her husband on watch, curled up together gazing at stars and wonder if this war would be the last Downton would ever see.

But today was a special day, because when no one was expecting it, the war had finally found them. Lord Grantham, Lady Grantham, Lady Mary, Tom Branson, and Bates, had all gone to London to make arrangements for the return of Lady Rosamund's body to Downton. Edith had wanted to be there for her aunt, a woman she had been so desperately close too. But she abstained from the trip after an emotional phone call from Marigold who begged her in frightful tears not to go to London, to stay in Downton, in safety, at all costs. So it was that she stayed behind with Rose and her children to sooth away her daughter's fears of losing her mother in a bombing. At the time she, Rose, and Rose's daughter, Rachel were about to make a social call to a luncheon with some of the women in the county, when the air raid alarm was sounded. Being the lady of the house, Edith had allowed Anna Bates and most of the household staff to rush to the village school to pick up their children and bring them back to the house for safety. The absence of most of the men in charge of the gun meant that the task was left to Thomas, Edith, and Rose, who volunteered to keep them company. Edith thought they both looked frightfully ridiculous in their mash of sundress and gunner's uniform. She had been happy that Mary wasn't there to see her like this.

But despite the misery of being alone in awful uniforms, with nothing to do but listen to Rose gossip, there was a hint of unease to everyone. It was all over Barrow's face as he looked to the horizon. While they were out there, they could hear the sounds of war echo in the distance. Thomas had been watching with Matthew's old binoculars, his jaw tight. The only time he had spoken was to inform them that the fighting was over Yew Tree Farm. Rose had taken Edith's hand when she posed the question that they surely wouldn't come here. Edith told her that it wasn't likely when Barrow didn't answer her. Both Thomas and Edith were on edge for the same reason. Marigold had told them that George had been assigned to the Yorkshire Air Shield. Both Butler and Great Lady knew that he was up there fighting, just barely out of his father's binocular's sight. On some level the golden haired Marchioness figured that Rose knew that her husband was out there too, so Edith refused to shut up the woman. She wasn't as heartless as to take away her only means of coping with the fear of the unknown only a few miles away.

But for the last few minutes, after huge, concussive, explosions echoed loudly in the distance, one right after another, the world had gone strangely quiet. John Bates Jr., Anna and Bates's eldest child, had been sent by his mother to come tell them that the Germans had been repulsed by the RAF. But Thomas refused to leave just yet. So they agreed to stay on an hour more. For the last few minutes Rose had lightened considerably, returning to airy form.

While the woman prattled on, Edith stared at Matthew's lens around Barrow's neck. It made her realize how much she missed her brother-in-law. How much she had missed her defender. She had never seen anyone more in love than Mary and Matthew in their day, but even in that love, he never let Mary get at her the way she always had since they were girls. He had been Edith's brother, her only friend in so many lonely days over the years. And he had never done it just because they were cousins, because she was Mary's sister. He did it, because he believed in her. Matthew Crawley believed in her when no one ever did. For that Edith would love him till the day she died, and she'd love his child with the same passion as he had loved and believed in her.

From the day he was born, Edith had always been there for George. When the entire family had given up on him, at the times when Mary refused to do her duty as his mother, Edith had taken Marigold and Sybbie with her to find him. She alone knew of the demons her sister had stoked in such a fine young man. Thousands of miles away from home, so alone in strange cities in the heart of America, Edith was his only taste of home, of family. Mary, Tom, Mama, and Papa, they never knew of the nights spent holding the lost young boy to her chest as he sobbed. George in one arm and Marigold in the other, the three of them, the cast outs, come together to build a place of acceptance amongst themselves in a foreign land. Even now, a mother's worry tore at Lady Edith. She'd never say the obvious, but George had become more her child than he'd ever be Mary's. In fact, over the years, though she was the last to contribute to the Downton Nursery, she had become the maternal lynch-pin to all the children.

Mary and Edith Crawley, since they were little girls, had fought over boys, then husbands, the titles, and now it was the children. In the babies younger days it was something that was never on Mary's checklist. She had George and Sybbie, Edith had Marigold. It was never a question that Lady Mary was the fairy tale princess, enrapturing the children with presents and her beauty. Her dominance cemented by Sybbie even calling her "Mama" every once in a while. She wouldn't correct her. The pale beauty would just simply look up at Edith with that cold, haughty smile that pitched tents in men's shorts. Like everyone in her life, Mary had taken for granted, that of course, the children loved her best. But it was in Edith's inability to deliver a living child that it changed.

For all the heartlessness of the woman in their life, George and Sybbie had the most loving hearts. When they saw how depressed Edith was after the loss of her boys and girl. They'd flock to her, crawl over her, and filled their hollowed out mama and aunt with their love. Edith, holding all of them tight to her, in tears, knew she'd never have another child. So she'd love the three that were in her life as much as humanly possible. And as Mary lost Cora, she had become quite the opposite of Edith. She'd not have anything to do with the babies. She wouldn't even look at George the same way as she used to. Edith had shouted at her, nearly ripped her perfect hair from her head at the stupidity of Mary on that Christmas morning, of what she had done to that precious boy. But Mary simply was too superior to Edith to even engage. She had written off her own child as a failure, and only had time for Sybbie, who carried all the comfort of having Sybil back when she was small. No one thought it fair what was asked of George on that day, but Mama, Papa, and Tom, as always, let Mary have her way. When George was sent away to America, a mutual agreement between mother and son who had more bitterness between them, than an eight year old should have, no one ever truly forgave Mary … especially Edith.

Over those years, Edith had dominated the children's lives. She, with Mama, helped Marigold become the most marvelous creature Edith had ever seen. She supported Sybbie at every turn, even against Tom and Mary, if whatever it was she fought them on truly made the girl happy. And of course she'd write to George, come see him, and sit up long in the night watching Marigold sleep, worrying, knowing that there was no one doing the same for Matthew's son.

It wasn't till they were teenagers that Mary started to notice, till she started to get jealous. George was home finally, with tales of his adventures in America. The family and curious guests would all gather around to hear about being chased by New York Railroad Pinkertons, riding the rails from Mississippi to Memphis in a hot snowy sky of endless southern cotton fields. Tales of racing from Detroit to Brownsville as a member of the Diamond Team on water colored Indian horses as quick as dreams, and of the strange voodoo witch doctors in New Orleans's back alleys. But when Mary entered the room, the story would stop till she left, or they migrated away from her to finish it without her. The children would gather around Edith in the drawing room after supper or in the Library during tea, laughing, confiding, and joking. Edith knew that it wasn't her sister's conscious, her realization that she had ignored all but Sybbie occasionally in her years of frolicking and flirting with her parade of suitors. It was the exclusion of her in her own home. It was that Lady Mary Crawley was not the center of attention for once.

Edith was.

Since then, for the last four years, Mary had tried hard to regain a love that was never in question. She had taken Sybbie and Marigold out to fancy London restaurants, introduced them to members of great societal clubs, given them mad metropolitan makeovers, and squandered fortunes on wardrobes for the season. All the while, she connected them to the great fashion and social circles of London. Mary, without much effort, gave the girls everything they couldn't get from poor old Edith. Sybbie and Marigold were grateful and gracious, happy to be a part of Mary's life and attention, but they felt uncomfortable having to choose sides between their two mothers. For Sybbie's part, Edith could not grudge the girl for leaning toward Mary. Tom would always be Mary's best friend and business partner. She could never replace Sybil for Tom, but for Sybbie, Mary was the only Mama she'd ever known. And likewise there was no question in Mary's mind that Sybbie was and always will be her daughter. Ever since the first time she held the cuing baby in her arms after Sybil died, Both Mary and Sybbie had imprinted on one another forever. But Marigold would always, always, be Edith's little girl. She was Marigold's best friend and keeper of her secrets. They did not go a day without talking to one another. Talking for hours and holding nothing back about gossip, trouble with friends, and boys she liked and hoped liked her back. Marigold loved her Aunt Mary desperately, even if she had no love for her mother. But she'd never turn her back on Edith, nor choose anyone over her. But for George … Both Mary and Edith had failed the boy.

Rose at dinner the other day, the last time everyone had been together, had spoken of going to see Atticus on the squadron's leave. She had offered to take everyone to see Sybbie … and maybe even George. Tom had thought it a kind gesture. Mama said she'd think about it, while everyone else, mostly Mary and Papa, had given a cold response to Rose's suggestion. Later that night, Edith felt horrible of not speaking up, not standing up for George. She was disgusted that she continued to let them dictate the family terms of his exile. But now, sitting here on pins and needles, Edith decided that she'd take Rose up on the offer. They'd all meet up in York with Marigold. Edith would reunite with the babies. It would be just like when they were children, alone in places like New York, San Antonio, Memphis, and New Orleans. It would be Edith, Marigold, George, and Sybbie, together again.

Just like old times.

Suddenly there was a loud humming that was carried on the wind. It was like being at the track of Henry's motor race, but the sounds seemed heavier somehow, angrier in a word that didn't quite make sense. It was at a distance, but they were closing fast, coming in louder. Thomas turned to the noise and put the binoculars to his eyes, looking out toward the village.

"Oh god …" He breathed.

Edith and Rose turned in unison to the Butler in anticipation. "What? Barrow what is it?!" She asked on bated breath. Thomas was speechless for a moment. His graying temples had a frightened vein visible. Then he turned quickly.

"Load it!" He shouted climbing down off the gunner's chair. "Hurry, M'lady, hurry!" He was in a panic.

The butler immediately lifted Rose by her slender waist off the ammunition crates she had been perched on for the last hour. The two women in flack vest and tin hat watched Thomas break open the ammunition and began pulling large belts of shells out. He quickly began handing them to Edith. The Marchioness was about to ask what she was supposed to do with them, when an awful sound ripped through her ears. It was like being at The Shoot, but if there were a hundred men, standing in a firing squad, with unlimited ammunition. A cold chill crawled up her spine and liquefied her belly.

She turned quickly to hear the racing motors coming closer and closer, the noises of large caliber weapons echoing through the village below. A frightened anxiety ran through her while Rose ducked down next to her. It was like something bad was coming and all she wanted to be doing was run away and hide before it came up the hill to get her.

"Edith, get up there!" Thomas had dispensed with formality as the cannon fire picked up ten-fold. He had ripped the shells out of the frightened woman's hand and began to shove them into a slot with desperate clanks.

"What?" She was shocked.

It was one thing to say she was on duty, to man the guns to defend her family's home. It was another thing to be actually _on duty_. In a thousand lifetimes, Lady Edith never thought that she would be ordered by a Butler into the seat of an Anti-Aircraft gun, and be expected to actually fire at planes.

"M'Lady, I can't run the swivel and fire the gun." He shouted as the fighting got closer.

"But maybe Rose and I …" She began frightened.

Barrow shook his head. "It takes at least one grown man to turn that crank. You and Lady Rose couldn't do it, even together. M'Lady you gotta get up there and shoot!" He instructed.

Dark eyes darted around in confusion and indecision. Finally, somehow, the voice of her Grandmother Violet echoed in her head with the very oddest of quotes. It was something about an aunt who loaded the guns at Lucknow. It was a weird tidbit, but for some reason it gave her enough heart. Suddenly, she found herself in the gunner's seat of an actual heavy weapon. She made a startled noise as the gun began wheeling around as Thomas cranked it into position.

She looked at the instruments in front of her. "Right, Barrow, how do I …?" She accidently pulled something.

 **CRAQU!**

A tracer round from the large cannon thundered loudly from the barrel with a flash. Edith called out, frightened by the sudden noise. She watched the round arc over the estate grounds, past the large library window, and rip away several branches from the tallest tree in the gardens. She placed her hand over her mouth at the damage. Rose rushed up to her with the same expression. Both women exchanged a shocked look.

"Like that!" Thomas sounded pained, cleaning out his ear with a pinky.

There had never been so many firsts for the village of Downton at one time in two centuries. Suddenly the quiet, anachronistic, life of the people had been broken by a hurricane of modern warfare. Shells arced with loud and rapid booming that punched through ancient stone walls, split white picket fences, tore vined trellises and shattered the village's beloved war memorial. People ran for cover and watched in shock as their future Earl flew down the main drag of the village being chased by foreign invaders, racing against dusty strafing trails that followed him. The culture shocked sight was followed by everyone as the planes headed for the 'Big House'.

For two hundred years, the head of a great Roman hero, the first King of Britannia was carved into the stone gate of Downton. He was a grand reminder of days of yore, and the beginning of a Kingdom that would one day become a vast empire that never could the sun set on. Cannon fire blasted away the carving in an explosion of dust and sediment. 20 Millimeter German guns ripped through the stone like it was a block of cheese. The old iron gate of cold rolled steel warped and bent in horrific screeching as it fell into the gravel road. Though the shells were coming hot and fast, destroying the great corner stones of Downton, they couldn't catch its Heir. The Spitfire thundered low over the gate and ivy covered wall onto the estate grounds, giving a twisting barrel roll under heavy fire. The arcing cannon ripped the old steel and wooden bench to pieces, thunking against the trunk of the tall tree that had ever loomed behind it.

A red light was on, warning George of dangerously low fuel. He cursed as he turned his evasive roll into a break. He looked down to see that there were gunners in the sand bunker. "Engage, goddamnit!" George growled as he lured the Aryan Count and his Nazi crony into a clean shot for the gunners, stringing them along for the Anti-Aircraft gun in front of his very own home. Finally the gunner opened fire. Their shots were just inches from striking the trailing ME. They weren't hitting anything, but at the angle he was flying, if he hooked back, he might give them a clean target. Leveling out, going right at Downton, George hit the throttle and pulled up hard. The Merlin roared as the plane went into a steep climb off the estate walls and toward the quickly sinking sun of the summer evening. The ME's gave chase after George.

Somewhere inside, Mr. Mosley was helping his kindly wife Mrs. Baxter sort her Ladyship's clothing. Hearing the sound of commotion, the School Master went to the window and opened it to see what was going on. He was suddenly face to face with a charging Spitfire that just barely climbed up the walls of Downton. He might have gotten over the shock if it wasn't for the two Nazi planes that gave chase, just missing the estate and him as well. When his soft spoken wife came into the room and asked what was going on. The timid former Butler closed the curtain and shook his head in a flop sweat. His wife continued to question him as he grabbed her hand and led her downstairs at a jog.

The RAF fighter bled power as it shot into the blue sky right over the pilot's own ancestral home. Cannon fire rose up after him. The maneuver was risky, flying in a straight line as he climbed. Suddenly something rattled behind him. A searing hot pain flashed across his arm. He cradled it for a second, the pain was dull and achy, but he held steady on the stick. When he removed his hand there was blood on Sybbie and his leather glove. One of the Hitler Youth's cannon had gotten through the cockpit glass and scathed his arm. But it was worse than that, as he heard his radio crackle inconsistently, before going out. He checked his gages, and saw that all of them were dead. And right through the stuffed little Great Dame, was a bullet hole that was embedded in the dashboard. Exposed wires spilled out, like entrails to an open stomach wound, snapping and sparking at him.

The electrical was dead.

"Shit!" He swore, flicking switches, and then pounding on his dash forcefully trying to get it back. He could still fly the fighter without the electrical, but he wouldn't be able to tell how fast he was flying, or how much fuel he had left, which was on fumes last time he checked. He didn't have time. Arcing inverted, the Spitfire hooked backward, and suddenly began a high speed dive right for Downton's gardens. The Count and his wing man did the same, not willing to give up their wounded prey.

Freefalling, George punched the breaks and bit his lip till it bled, fighting against the force of the dive. His house literally coming closer and closer as the moments passed. The noise of the diving planes gave a terrifying whining that vibrated through every inch of the grand estate and occupants ear drums. Just moments from crashing, George leveled out hard, and hit the throttle, buzzing over the pointed top of the castle and speeding over the Anti-Aircraft gun.

When the German planes did the same, the gunner open fire, the shells grazed off bits of ancient stone on the roof of the great estate. In the rash of fire, one shell flew true, and shattered the back left rudder of the trailing ME. Suddenly jerking out of control, the plane wing clipped the Hitler Youth. It threw the fighter just enough to where the top most point of the apex of Downton Abbey, drew a deep gash into the back of the 109's tail. Heavy plumes of thick black smoke trailed out of the Count's Plane.

Spinning out of control at high speed, Edith, Rose, and Thomas watched the trailing Nazi fighter crash into the white columns of the Roman structure in the estate garden. The Lead fighter limped away with a sputtering engine, breaking off, limping away like a whipped hound. For a long moment Lady Edith stood from her seat and watched with wide eyes at the smoking Messerschmitt that was trapped under the ruins of white Roman column and roof. Slowly, she came to realize it was her own handy work.

"Oh my god, oh god, Edith!" Rose gasped and ran up, grabbing a hold of her cousin's arm and palming her open lips. The woman turned to her cousin. "You got him …" her voice was muffled by her hand. "EDITH!" She shouted in mostly relief of stress, flailing her hands in excitement. "You got him!" She squealed. Her arms wrapped around the woman's waist as she jumped up and down in celebration.

Edith watched the RAF plane, now trailing white vapor, speed away. "Yes … I got him." She said absently. In her heart of hearts, there was just a little bit of justice for the father of her little girl in the flickering haze of the smoking Messerschmitt.

The Spitfire creaked and shuttered as it passed over the village of Downton. The pilot was tired, lightheaded, and starting to space out. After five months of non-stop combat, on a diet of chocolate, coffee, and beans, it was all catching up with him. George Crawley had used up all of his mental and physical reserves in rescuing his family, and running for his life on the mid-September afternoon. Now as the sun began to set on the perfect summer day, the pilot was flying blind over his own land, not sure if the plane was wobbling … or he was. The dials were dead, the radio was in inoperative, and he wasn't sure how much fuel he had left of any kind for himself or his plane. All George knew was that there was no way he was gonna make it to the airfield.

He was just over the forested country road between Ripon and Downton when he heard a sputter from the engine. He quickly throttled down, seeing, in the orange and purple light of the swift evening, that the propeller was starting to slow. He muttered a fairly shocking swear word as he felt the Spitfire's, shot up, wings start to vibrate. With one last rolling click, the engine finally died. There was a thunderous noise that deafened George in the sudden silence that overcame the cockpit. For a moment or two, the momentum that carried the plane in the air, made him feel almost like a gliding bird. But slowly the fighter began to dip and sink toward the trees.

Immediately, he pushed the gliding fighter toward the center, lining up with the lonely stretch of road. On instinct, the young aviator flipped the switch for the wheels to come down, trying to start the landing cycle. But he was met with a buzzed protest that did nothing. "Damnit!" He shouted, pounding on the dash. With the electrical dead, the landing gear was thunking against doors that wouldn't open.

"This isn't gonna be pretty …" He said to himself through gritted teeth. The dead hunk of metal began to pick up speed. The aero-dynamic design of the fighter made a loud whining noise as it streaked out of the sky. It drifted from one side of the road to the other. George pulled back hard on the stick, blood gushing from his wounded arm, as he strained to keep the plane level for a crash landing.

The Spitfire hit the deck.

George was jostled, growling in pain, as the plane skidded across the country road. His wings tore away low hanging branches and dug up underbrush and dirt. The momentum carried him far down the forest road, moving at an angle. Seeing something tall and stone coming right for him. George immediately lowered his goggles to protect his eyes from shattering glass.

With a mighty crunch, the plane hit a roadside memorial with enough force to shatter it. But twenty years of undergrowth and the monument's solid foundation was enough to break the Spitfires momentum. Caught on the nub where the memorial was and tree roots, the fighter slammed into the trunk of a tree that was already gashed by the collision of a motor car from long ago.

Suddenly the world was quiet again.

Disoriented, George lifted his goggles back onto the top of his forehead and slumped in his seat. The world spun as he stared at the dirt and leaf caked cockpit glass. Smoke plums hazily sauntered from the front of the Spitfire. It took him a few moments to register that he was on the ground again. He sat blankly in his seat staring at a familiar tree with a familiar gash he had seen so many times. It was a gash, a tree that had haunted him his entire life.

He ripped off his breathing mask in residual frustration of the day's action, losses, and his current circumstances. Finally George had his wits about him enough to know he was alive. He checked the plane with a good long look around. The wings had deep gashes and holes in them, the propeller was dirt stained and bent, and the engine was smoking like a fire grill. "Sybbie's gonna kill me." He gave a long sigh and shake of his head. He grunted in pain when he lifted his wounded arm. He cradled the graze with a hand while he flexed with a glare of extreme ache. It ripped through the side of the bicep, missing the bone. He looked at his dash and saw the obliterated hole in the body of his little Great Dame.

"I'll be damned."

The little girl's toy was only held in whole by a few stitches, while the fuzzy entrails hung out of its gut. He was saddened by the near fatal wounding of his toy, but when he considered that it could've easily been his arm and obliterated bone in his arm, he considered himself incredibly lucky.

That's when he heard it.

From somewhere in the distance there was a sputtering motor. It ran for a minute or so, and then it coughed, before running again. It sounded like a disoriented bee, brandishing it's stinger in threat, as it hobbled on one wing. George immediately looked up and then behind him. As the sun set low on the beautiful Yorkshire evening, the water colored sky just peeking through the tree canopies shimmered off a black and grey ME 109 that was trailing smoke. George stayed extremely still, like a startled deer's first whiff of a hunter. His dark blue eyes tracked the Austrian Count as he flew low over the country road. He didn't breath, didn't twitch, while the mess of a German fighter passed overhead. He watched him closely for a long moment, knowing that he was also being watched.

The Hitler Youth was checking to see if the Heir of Downton was dead.

"Shit!"

George was moving before anyone else would've. It was the way that the ME tilted a moment, just a hair. No one else would've known that it was the first sign that the Nazi pilot was about to turn around. Clearly, he was unsatisfied with his recon flight. Quickly George unbuckled his harness, and unscrewed the Oxygen hose on his breathing mask from the plane. When he gazed up, he saw the ME hooking around. He instinctually, unpinned his lucky charm and stuffed what remained of it in his Jacket pocket. With a yank, he went after the canopy.

CLUTHNK

"Come on …"

CLUTHNK

"Goddamnit come on!"

The canopy wouldn't budge.

The young captain saw that the ME was starting to move into attack position for a strafing run. A forceful growl accompanied his strain. Pulling and pulling, George tried to get the lever to budge. But it seemed that it was sealed tightly after the extreme change in air pressure and hot shells grazing by it during the battle amongst the clouds. It was clear now that there was no way it was going to open by force. He knew that back at base, Sybbie would've thought this funny, would've teased him, kept him in there for a minutes or so, faking like she was going to go get a drink down at the Officer's mess and leave him there over night. But right now, this wasn't a joke. In the distance, the youth could hear the Nazi fighter's sputtering engine, coming closer.

George did what George Crawley did best. He did what was improper and completely unconventional. Reaching into his gun belt that was buckled to his waist under his jacket, he drew his side arm. His father and Aunt Sybil's service revolver had a few more nicks and a duo of new scars from action in Acre, Jerusalem, and Egypt. It had taken a few more German lives since Matthew Crawley led the charge from the trenches. And it had been pointed at a few more degenerates since Sybil Crawley threatened Thaddeus Branson, a drunken and envious bully who knocked Tom out with a sucker punch and tried to have a taste of "the rich life" for himself.

Three shots were grouped close together, bunching holes in the Spitfire's canopy. Holstering his weapon, the young man reached into his seat and pulled out the metal pipe Sybbie had given to him. He could kiss the raven haired miracle worker for being a pain in the ass. George grunted as he began turning the three bullet holes into a gaping one, big enough to get his arm through, trying to get to the outside latch.

The loud whining noise was starting to get closer. Straining desperately, George's gloved fingers were just touching the tip of the emergence latch. "Almost there …" He breathed, looking up to see the shadowed 109 almost in firing range. "Come on …!" He shouted at no one, trying to push it. The problem was that the latch was for emergency personnel, in case the pilot was trapped in the cockpit during a fire, or when leaking fuel on the runway. It was, however, not designed for a pilot to use.

Trying desperately and failing, he could hear the Austrian Earl getting closer. It was no use, though he wouldn't give up trying. He knew that some poor bastard would find him slumped over his cockpit, riddled like Swiss cheese. And all he could think of was that it was going to be a hard day for Marigold and Sybbie.

Suddenly someone grabbed the young pilot's wrist. He looked up and saw a shadowy figure standing in the road. He was a tall, straight postured, silhouette of a good English chap. He wore a tin hat and some semblance of a uniform that was hard to make out in the shadows of the last light of the day.

"I've got you!" The voice shouted.

The man forced George's arm back inside the plane, and quickly turned the emergency latch. A side door popped out and the damaged canopy slid back. A light headedness came over pilot at the heady first rush of normal altitude and fresh air. The man's hands were firm, but not unkind as he pulled George out of the cockpit. In the background 20 millimeter cannons began a warped sounding run straight down the middle of the road.

"Come on, chap, come on!" The soldier coached like a corner man in a boxing ring as a disoriented George's legs turned to pudding as his boots hit the ground. The youth ate dirt, dazed at the exertion, exhaustion, and air pressure all of which weighed him down. He might as well have been an infant in the man's arms.

The tin hatted soldier wrapped his arms around the young officer by the chest and dragged him hurriedly away. His crystal eyes were lit up, his face illuminated clearly as the Nazi Count shredded the RAF Ace's fighter. The explosion ripped through the peaceful summer evening as the Count buzzed overhead into the sky. The soldier watched him leave with the gravest frowns of the most hateful detest.

George was mumbling incoherently when the man finally sat him against a tree under the shadowy cover of the forest. The bump gave him a moment of clarity as he looked up to see a man kneeling in front of him. He was checking the pilots wounded arm, his eyes never leaving the young man. He knew his face, he knew this man … he'd seen him before.

"What happened to your stick?" George asked in confusion of treading between consciousness and dream world vision while his world began to darken faster than the coming night.

"My dearest little Chap …"

Slowly the soldier removed his tin helmet and smiled with the deepest mixture of pride and crippling sorrow. George knew sight of the dancing man from the foyer, his bird like nose; the pale face, the blond hair, and the way he looked … looked at someone he loved so much.

"You are my stick."

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _The Aviator" – The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles_

" _Promontory" – Trevor Jones & Randy Edelman _


	7. Interlude - Wildfire

**Act Break …**

 **Interlude: Wildfire**

 _14 Years Ago_

The snow fell languid and slow, caressing the frigid air, selecting the tree screen that covered a gravel and stone walkway that was centuries old. It was a cold, cold Christmas Eve in the village of Downton. Most people were already home, those who kept their little shops open, felt the timeless drag of the clock till their luncheon closing time. In the small enclosure of ancient stone and wood that collected the snowy accumulation there was a sleepy spell that fell over the country village. Men and women walking as if in a daze to and fro, braving the bitter cold picking up the last things they needed before stretching out with the ones they loved for the next two days. All around the cracked cobble stone, were bundled, red faced, children. They were giggling, running, playing, yelling. Snowballs were flying, snow soldiers being erected by the Great War Memorial. The Dreams of all the possibilities of tomorrow, all the joy and magic of childhood memories that would last a lifetime, ran through their tiny minds. It was a time before they knew of money, of strife, of what was waiting for them out there in the worlds of their father and grandfathers. They all believed in miracles, they all believed that anything was possible.

It was the only belief that threw more coal on the fire of the small boy who ran faster than any child that day.

Snowballs whizzed by his tiny head, shoes pounded hard on stone, and people called out to him in alarm and curse. But the boy didn't hear anything. Blood was rushing through his ears, his lungs were on fire, and his breath was misting into his eyes, coming apart like steam on a runaway train. His nose and mouth were covered by his granny's scarf. His hat secured to his head, brown tweed coat, and winter pants had snow caked to them. The supple black leather gloves that belonged to his mother were still too big for his tiny hand, but they gripped the white paper bag hard.

The village children, who were ignorant of the boy's plight, played on. But they halted at the small boy's passing, watching the fastest kid in the County of Grantham, run faster and jump higher than anyone had ever seen before. When they arrived at school after the holidays, they'd swear he was the fastest man alive. It would be a rumor, a distinction that would stick with him for the rest of his life around those parts.

He was George Crawley, "The Blue Comet", the great speedster of Grantham … names that would forever haunt him in his darkest moments after this quiet Christmas.

His little arms pumped ear to pocket, he hurdled a fence, and juked a grocery man. The boys down at the "Grantham Arms" amongst the racket of their holiday festivities and wild music, gathered at the windows to cheer the speed trail of snow powder and frothing air in drunken pride. Later on when they heard the news of what happened, they wouldn't need their wives to tell them of the shame they felt in the way they acted in that moment. Afterward, whenever they would see the boy passing in the village, hand in hand with Anna Bates, they'd take their hats off to the little lord in respect.

Any man, any father was expected to do all he could in the situation George was in. In a just world it would be a father who would've, should've been running, should've been hurrying back home with a white bag in hand. But it wasn't. It was merely a child. It was just a small boy who was so suddenly burdened with the weight of his whole world, his own family's hopes and dreams. It's very future on his shoulders.

And no man would forget the bravery of speed in the legs of the smallest Crawley that day.

It was a mistake. That is what they'll say several days from now. That's what the hospital board will rule. It was all just an honest mistake, but a costly one, one that would forever change the village of Downton forever.

It had been a record breaking winter that froze the Yorkshire counties to their very roots, right down to the marrow of the bones. Heavy snows, wet sheets of deadly ice, one layered on top of the other, like a great wedding cake. It was the hardest winter that anyone could remember in so long, a true killing frost. It had reminded Lady Grantham of the winters in Cincinnati. Most of the village had come down with the illness over the first few weeks. Even at the house Mrs. Patmore, Daisy, Mrs. Baxter, Mr. Bates, Lord Grantham himself, and the baby were down. It had come on so suddenly, so violently, both winter and the sickness that the hospital had been overrun. The supplies had been dwindling. Trucks slipped on ice and got whited out in the snow storms on the way from York thus the supplies were coming infrequently. It was a strain on the doctors and nurses to keep up with so many patients. One might have thought that they were back in the war with the influx of casualties.

Later it would be said that had the hospital been staffed properly, had there been younger doctors and nurses, men and women in their prime to captain the crisis, had Lady Grantham not allowed her friends stay on past their welcome, that the most egregious of mistakes would not have been made. It was a deadly mixture of exhaustion and old age that produced a great tragedy.

They'd chalk it up to incompetence, corruption, and favoritism. It was the kindness of a Self-Made American Girl who didn't have the courage, the stiff upper lip of a true Englishwoman to make changes. She was a foreign woman who let people's feelings factor in staying on longer than they should have. In the end they'd say that it was all entirely Lady Grantham's fault. It would be a finding that would lead her grief stricken Lord husband to lose all composure and attack the mousy and coldly unfeeling president of the York hospital board. They were separated after the first punch, and a broken Countess, clutching her husband's lapels, only asked in tears for the love of her life to leave the man, and take her back to their home. Afterward Cora Crawley would be removed as president, Isobel Crawley Merton would be forced into retirement, and Doctor Clarkson … would never have a chance to face formal charges.

All because of one mistake, one honest mistake …

George Crawley had rather liked Christmas, which was why he had been up so early. The halls were empty, the rooms were bare, and there wasn't enough life in Downton Abbey to fill a hall closet. But that was going to change by this afternoon. The whole family was coming over. His mama had insisted that everyone come, and somehow, as usual, got her way. Some might have said, if anyone would believe them, that Lady Mary Crawley was lonely. More so, some might have even staked a claim that she missed everyone … even Lady Edith. But the winter was clearing, and there was rumor that they might even see the sun today. So overall there was an excitement in the air.

It was strange to the boy. But then there had been an uptick of happiness in the old estate since Cora was born. Everyone seemed to have gone through some sort of revival of spirit. Some great rebirth of happiness after so much gloom had infected the place in the long years bereft of hope of the survival of this way of life.

The truth was that George hadn't been affected at all. The boy admittedly didn't really know that much happiness in his life. There had always been a strange gloomy cloud over him at all times that seemed to be noticed by everyone. He had once heard his Aunt Rosamund mention to his Granny that the boy was not born under a bad sign, but _was_ the bad sign concerning the events of his birth. His Granny told her that she didn't think so noticing that George had heard them. Later, while she changed for dinner, she took a moment to sit him in her lap. Stroking his curls, Lady Grantham reassured him that he wasn't cursed. George nodded, but it saddened him to see the uncertainty in the lovely older woman's matching eyes as she buried her face in his little chest comfortingly. He hugged her head with all the love in the world … but he didn't believe her.

There were times when George felt terribly alone in the big house. He didn't have nannies anymore. When Sybbie and Marigold were in the nursery they had nannies and nurses. But when Sybbie went off to London with Uncle Tom, and Aunt Edith had gotten married to Bertie and they took Marigold with them to Brancaster … they all left George. It hurt to know that it was because of George personally that the nannies and nurses wouldn't come around. A Princess of some sort, hated him, hated him so much that she scared everyone away who wanted to be his friends. His Mama, who had never been ostracized before in her life and was angrily mortified that society had done so to her own son before he had even been given a fighting chance, told him that everyone was just being ridiculous. She assured her boy and everyone that there was no Ottoman Princess with a "price" on the small boys head. It was all just a big misunderstanding that should've been ancient history by now. Plus, it didn't matter anyway, because you can't be friends with the servants. He remembered the hurt look on Anna's face as she was leaving his mother's room.

It was just one more lie by a Crawley girl that George didn't believe.

Being cursed and with a Turkish bounty, gave the boy an inordinate amount of time to himself. There were no nannies to instruct him. His Mama was the Agent for the estate, and his Uncle Tom was opening Henry and his business's branch in London. His Aunt Edith, who usually would spare time for him, was in Brancaster. Both his Granny and Grandma were always at the Hospital, and Donk was working on something important in the library. He had lessons with Mr. Mosley in the afternoon, and his Grandma Isobel helped in the morning with his education. But other than that, George had found himself utterly alone most hours of the day. After Tea, Lady Mary gave him a kiss, a smile and then went upstairs to start her shift with the baby. It was a strange thing to the boy that while everyone else seemed reinvigorated by life and the modern times, the Heir to Downton felt quite stagnate.

It should've bred some sort of distaste for the new baby, and nine out of ten times any other child would grow to hate the little girl. But nine out of ten children were not fathered by Matthew Crawley. Most children didn't inherit his gentleness and understanding to others caught up in unfortunate situations that were no fault of their own. There had been so many times, so many opportunities, for the boy to hate the baby, to hate his step-father, to hate his mother … but he didn't. And it wasn't even that his mama was getting much better at balancing work and her children, including taking him with her on the runs to the farms. It was something more important for the boy than to be included in his mother's new family.

The reality was that all the time that George spent alone, he usually spent it in the nursery. He took his school work, his books, and his toys into the nursery and sat with the baby. In a strange way, he couldn't hate Little Cora, because she was his only friend. When he was mad, when he was sad, when he heard something funny on his walkabouts in the village, he'd tell three people in the whole world about it, and the toddler was one of them. Little Cora was always there, was always in the crib when he came home. So he'd talk to her, because without Sybbie and Marigold, the baby was the only one who would listen to him. Some days the baby with her little dark curls, and her father's eyes was the only person happy to see him. She'd stand up in her crib and reach for him. The day wasn't complete without a kiss good morning and goodnight from her big brother.

The baby had been sick for the last couple of weeks, he knew that. Every day he came to read to her, Pulps, dime adventures, airplane manuals, books on Egyptian Archeology. And she'd just lie there in her crib and watch him with tiredly sallow little eyes. The other night, his mama slept in the nanny's room, and George joined her. He could tell that she was worried, so he laid his head on her belly. As he slept she stroked the boy's darkening curls and watched him. There was something different in Lady Mary's eyes, like she was seeing her boy for the first time after all these years. And it made her happy and sad all at the same time. He was growing in likeness to somewhere between Matthew and Sybil, everyone that was missing in her life. Cora was her future, but George was her past, and it had been so hard for her to balance the two. But right then it was the past that she needed. Her two darlings, Matthew and Sybil, were all she needed with a mind clouded in doubts and fears and George was just that, he was them. So she had clung to him, clung so tightly, and in her moment of overwhelming love of the boy who was haunted by the missing, Mary Crawley put too much faith in that perfect union of memory and sentiment, and forgot what he really was …

It opened the door to a mindset that would make what was to come even more tragic.

Most of the staff and Lord Grantham had been strong enough to fight off the illness, but the baby required a new medicine. And it had been days before it could be delivered. In the meantime the house was going all day and night. From the Lady of the House to the scullery maid, everyone tried their hand at home remedies and grandmother's recipes. All to help keep Little Cora afloat till help could arrive. When it finally had, from the slippery roads of York, in the hands of Doctor Clarkson, there had been a sigh of relief in the house. Last night everyone slept soundly, the long dark trial of their hearts had come to an end as they fed the droplets to the baby.

But this morning when George walked into the nursery, air racing book underarm, to wait for all the family and guest to arrive for the Christmas party, he paused.

The toddler had been laying head down, her little chest breathing slowly. He had leapt up to lean over the railing of her crib, to see that Cora had her eyes open, but they were glazed over, almost unseeing. Even when she had been sick, the baby had always been a talker, cueing, giggling, and caterwauling just to make sure everyone knew she was there. But it scared George to see her so silent, so completely disoriented.

It took him into his mother and Henry's room. Lady Mary was in bed, reading the paper in her silk nightgown, her breakfast tray in front of her. George had informed her of the baby's state, but his mama had dismissed it. Of course she was "out of it" she has been sick for a week, she was properly getting her rest. It wasn't that Mary didn't care, but for a woman who motherhood did not ever come naturally, she had been up for four straight days with her child. Today was the day for rest, a moment before the party, before the great celebration of the anniversary of their new lives.

The danger was over.

The boy nodded, even went as far as to steal bacon off her plate. There was a mischievous giggle as she swatted him playfully with her paper. He had left his mother with a smile, the last he'd ever remember. But when he left her room, he still wasn't convinced. With all of his heart he wanted to believe his mama. But something just wasn't right. He spent several minutes pacing the nursery, looking back at the baby as she watched him, her breath slowing. This didn't look like a recovering baby. He knew he'd get in trouble for what he was about to do, but he didn't care.

Something wasn't right.

Swiping the baby's pediatric medicine vile, the boy quickly descended the steps, ignoring a hello from Henry. He knew that he should've said something to him, but in these things, George's step-father would usually defer to Mary. Though he'd fight her on most, children were the one subject in which he would give to his wife. The man watched in confusion while the boy rushed to open the access door to downstairs and descend to the servant's hall

The downstairs had been decked out for Christmas, with homemade decorations and a small Christmas tree in the corner next to the fireplace. The household staff was setting up for their Christmas luncheon, half the staff rushing about while the other half sat at the table, headed by a conversing Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes. They had all notice George come down, but had gotten out of the habit of standing at attention. George had become a fixture of downstairs life. Without a nanny, they found George Crawley down their a lot. They had taken turns watching the boy, each absently teaching him something about their trade. Daisy how to bake, Mrs. Baxter how to sew, Mr. Mosley how to read, Mr. Carson how to clean silver properly, Mrs. Hughes how to dodge silver cleaning lessons, and John and Anna Bates just about everything else under the sun. But when he came down he was looking for his friend, he was looking for the Butler, Thomas Barrow.

When he found him, he was sitting across from John and Anna, smoking a cigarette, watching ambiguously the annoyingly happy married couple wrap presents for their new baby's first Christmas. Old wounds never quite fade and neither did rivalries. But Thomas remained on his best behavior, knowing that any actions taken against Mr. and Mrs. Bates would put a stain on his character to George who thought all three of them as important to him. But when he saw the small boy, the Butler lit up like the great tree in the foyer of Downton. He shook the boys hand and offered him a seat good naturedly. George ignored the many "Happy Christmas" said to him from the smiling servants. The boy informed Thomas that he had to talk to him about something very important.

Seeing the urgency in the boy's eyes and the need for secrecy, Barrow asked if they might borrow Mr. Carson's pantry. The older man, who had been contently bickering with his wife about the wrapping paper they used, didn't seem to see why not. Though Mrs. Hughes had offered them her sitting room, Thomas denied it kindly, not needing Anna to overhear whatever they were going to say from the vent. The Lady's Maid was already quite suspicious of the two with deep frowning glances back and forth.

George had gone down to see Thomas, because he was the only one with medical knowledge, and the only one who would keep his secrets. The small boy didn't know much, but he had a good feel for medicine, two generations of doctors in his blood had not dissipated yet and all of these instincts were telling him that there was something bad about the medicine they had given the baby. He explained his paradox and troubles to Thomas, giving him the vile.

The man hadn't spent five seconds reading the label before his eyes went wide. He left George in the pantry as he stormed out of the room with the slam of the door. George followed long enough to watch the servant's hall go from a place of coming merriment and explode into chaos as Thomas Barrow charged up the stairs only half uniformed, followed by the other staff shouting for him to explain what was going on.

George followed Mrs. Baxter up the stairs and pushed his way past everyone who had bottled necked just outside the staircase door. He rushed out to the manor's foyer, standing in front of the great lit tree he and Thomas had picked out. He watched the butler trip and stumble his way up the stairs, Anna following him to go get Lady Mary and Lord and Lady Grantham at once. All the boy knew was that he was right.

Something bad had happened last night.

He stayed at the foot of the staircase, watching from below, as his mother, without a robe, rushed from one side of the house to the other in her long nightgown, Henry trailing behind her. Next, he saw his grandfather and grandmother. One already dressed, the other in her morning robe, rushing to the nursery. George didn't follow or go up. He wasn't sure what the problem was, but he didn't want to get blamed for it, and he didn't want to get in trouble for bringing on this scramble.

He waited by himself for a long time, listening to alarmed voices muffle loudly from the nursery wing, drifting down the stairs to the small boy. He was frightened at the desperate and worrying sounds that were coming from the nursery. Finally, from somewhere deep inside, he got the courage to go up the stairs. When he reached the top of the landing, he was met by Anna who had both Lady Grantham and his mama's winter clothing in arm. It was obvious that they were going to the Hospital.

"It'll be okay." Anna said with a glassy eyed nod to the boy.

There was something desperately sad, she knew something, something terrible had happened, and there was nothing that could be done. George returned the nod, but didn't believe in her comfort. Suddenly three figures were storming down the hallway. His Donk was in a rage at Thomas, Henry absently following behind, as if he was in a daze, in a different world all together.

"Well when the bloody hell were you gonna fix it?!"

"The roads are iced over, M'lord, there was nothing we could've done."

"Then who was the imbecilic who left the car out of the garage!"

"It wasn't anyone's fault, M'lord, No one saw the storm coming, no one."

Suddenly Lady Mary rushed out of the nursery. George wasn't sure he had ever seen his usually frigid mother more terrified in his entire life. It made his legs get weak, his heart sink into his stomach, and his hairs prickle on the back of his neck. If she was frightened, then her son was completely terrified. She grabbed her husband's arm and looked to the Butler.

"Drive us to the hospital, now!" She demanded.

"I … I can't, M'lady." There was something devastated and in shock about the way he spoke. Thomas Barrow could barely look the panicked mother in the eye.

"Why not?!" Her red eyes were infuriated.

"The engine is frozen. And none of the other cars have been adapted to the conditions."

There was something eerily calm and disconnected in the way Henry Talbot spoke. He looked down at the carpeted floor at his feet and saw nothing but the abyss of a blank mind reeling. His wife and her father turned to the man with looks of outrage and shock at the seemingly laconic reaction to it all.

"Wha …" Mary's mouth hung open at the complete unwinnable situation. Thinking only moments ago she was talking about New Year's plans with a husband and a getaway holiday with George. Now her baby girl was in danger and the universe was plotting so nothing she could do could save her.

Thomas strode for. "All we need is some stimulants to get her heart rate back up, M'lady!" He explained. "We just need someone to run to the hospital, and get them!" Thomas pushed his way back into the nursery, the only one with the training to keep the baby going.

There was a long silence between the quietly frozen people in the hallway. Robert and his daughter met their gaze, the woman feeding off the dwindling strength of the pillar she had always leaned on in times of trouble. He motioned to Henry pointedly, all the words unspoken with one look telling her of what had to be done. Robert jogged back inside the nursery after Barrow.

Mary gave a hard swallow and turned to her husband. Henry was leaning against a column on the balcony overlook, staring blankly at the coats of arms that hung around the foyer of the manor. If one would've asked the dealership owner what day it was, he might never be able to have told you.

"Henry …" Mary rushed to his side. "Henry you have to go to the hospital!" She demanded. But the man didn't respond. He didn't even look his lovely wife in the eyes. "Henry!" She shook him hard. It took a beat or two till the man bit his bottom lip and finally met Lady Mary's gaze.

"Henry you have to run to the hospital and get stimulants!" She searched his eyes in a panic.

"Mm ..." He acknowledged her. "Right … go get stimulants." He nodded and he moved just an inch. But then he stopped. He seemed to be a man in complete conflict with every thought and emotion, every movement and instinct. Henry Talbot's whole body was at war with itself. Grief, sorrow, panic, fear, it all took hold of him.

"Mary … I'm, I'm afraid." He looked up at her in a deep shock. "I'm afraid I can't …" He sniffed hard. "Mm …" He shook his head. "I … I can't." He was disappearing again.

"No … Henry, for god sake, Henry!" Mary shook him, tried to hold him up. But the man only sank slowly to the floor, his back against the overlook column.

It wasn't that Henry Talbot was a coward, or that he was a weak man. In his younger days he would've gone running before Mary had even left the Nursery. But every man has a breaking point, and today Henry Talbot had reached his. Some would say that it was the beginning of the end when he witnessed the fiery death of his best friend on the race track. But after all the death that had surrounded him in the trenches for years, he had come to motorcar racing to try and escape those brutal memories, to try and outrun the German gun. He had made new friends. He had made a new life for himself. And each time he lost something, he found some other way to replace it, ever running from the memories of the Kaiser's men. He lost his brother and cousins on the Somme, so he raced cars. He lost his best friend on the track, so he married Mary Crawley. But now that he lost his baby girl … where was there to go? Where was there to run too anymore?

No matter where Henry Talbot ran, death found him.

"Henry, Henry … Henry! You have to get up! You have to get up and save our baby!"

Mary shook him, grabbed his face frantically. But no matter what she said, the man wouldn't move. He had completely shut down. His knees were pulled up to his chest, his arms hugging them tightly, shame on his face, deep, deep, shame. The beautiful woman would have had it easier moving a stubborn mule, than the shell-shocked veteran who had lost too much.

Despair, sorrow, and fear, so much fear, ran through the woman on that Christmas Eve. It was a fear that went right down to the core, the kind that was only felt once in a lifetime. But for Lady Mary Crawley it was twice now that it had interrupted her life. It was a state of mind, a place so dark that it changes you, changes you forever. It had taken four years to recover from the death of her husband, and in those times she had gone from cold, to haughty, to snobbish, to somewhere just before marriage had been blissful, but never the same Mary that Matthew had known and loved. Now, faced with the old dread, the emptiness again, there was no going back to even what little she had salvaged from the last time. As her daughter was in her final minutes, all Mary Crawley could think was why couldn't she have died with Matthew? Why couldn't she have been driving back with him, George safely in the care of mama and Isobel?

Many years later no one who was there that day, who heard the story, and who watched what happened first hand will ever know what was going through Mary's half crazed mind. What she saw when she looked down the hallway at George watching her in the distance? No one was sure what she was thinking, what she thought would happen, or if she was thinking at all when she ran to him. So many years in a frozen ice block, not even the ageless beauty knew why she did what she did. Maybe it was because of the dark abyss that she had skirted so closely so many times before. Maybe it was all the clawing and scraping to return to the world of the living. Or was it that George, who was always there for her in the dark days, never let her down. Some would say later that in her desperation she saw the two people missing in her life, the two people who could never let her down. He was one part Matthew, one part Sybil, a baby born in tragedy there to replace all that was missing in her life. It was possible after witnessing so many miraculous things, Matthew walking again, escaping from the lost patrol during the war, Reggie Swire's money. If she had prayed hard enough, their love, Mary and Matthew, the star crossed lovers of Downton, had squared away one last miracle inside the little soul they created together.

All anyone knew was that it wasn't right what happened next.

"No …" Anna stepped in front of Mary, before she reached George. "M'Lady, don't! It's already over!" She sounded forceful, and defiant. The woman knew what was about to happen. Even if it cost her, her notice, Anna Bates tried to stop Lady Mary.

There was something practically mad in the way her employer looked to her maid. "Get out of my way, Anna!" She snarled at the woman. She grabbed the blond by her arm and yanked her behind.

"Don't do this, Lady Mary, please! It's impossible!"

George looked from Anna to his mother in indecision. He didn't know what was going on. He had never seen the two women fight like this, he had never seen his mother look this afraid in his life, and he had never seen such desperation on Anna's face before. His pale, silky mother dropped to her knees to get eye level with him. Her slender fingers were like cold hooks in vice on his arms.

"Darling, listen to me …" Her voice was very grave. "Cora is very sick …" She explained.

"M'Lady, please, don't do this!"

George gazed at Anna for a moment, but his mother had seemed to have blocked her out completely. "I … I know." He nodded.

There was something empty in the fake smile she gave him. "Of course you do." She shook her head her voice trembling. There was something frantic in her red tinted eyes. "There's a way to make her better." She readjusted her grip on him.

"I'm begging you don't make him do this …"

The boy focused on Mary as she shut her eyes in anger at Anna's pleading. When she opened them, she was almost enticing in luring the small boy to her. "But I need your help, Cora, she needs your help." She nodded so he'd comprehend what she was saying.

"I can help." He agreed.

"Don't do this …"

"Darling, listen to me." Mary centered him just as he was about to look back to Anna. "You have to do this, do you understand me?" his mother was stern. "There's no one else." Her voice cracked.

It was that one moment. He would point to that one moment as to why he did what he did. In truth, it was easier to try than to do nothing. But in all of his life, in his most horrible nightmares, George Crawley would point to that one moment. It was when the strongest woman he ever knew nearly shook apart. Mary Crawley nearly broke in front of her son, broke into tiny pieces that could never be put back together again. She was vulnerable, she was exposed, and the small boy loved her. He had loved her so much that all he wanted to do was protect her, to make it better. When she nearly broke, George knew all the way back then that there was no going back, no backing out.

He'd do anything for her.

"I'll do it. I'll get the Stimulants from Grandma Isobel. I'll help Cora." He nodded.

"Thank you! Oh, my darling, thank you!" She pulled him close and kissed him all over his face.

Tears were streaming down her milky cheeks as she reached back and began to pull items of clothing out of Anna's arms, not sparing the Lady's Maid even a look of contempt. She wrapped Lady Grantham's dark blue scarf around his mouth and nose, taking a pair of her own leather gloves, she pulled them over the boy's hands.

"Go get your coat and hat!" She shook him.

The boy paused. The whole situation was starting to catch up to him. His baby sister wasn't just sick. It wasn't like it was even a week ago. Something much worse was happening here. The young child was staring at Henry several yards away. He was watching a man that was staring right back at him. A single tear fell from the former auto racer's eye. And in that tear, in that face, and the way his mother was looking at him, in Anna's protests … it dawned on him.

The baby was dying.

"George …"

His chest was heaving and he felt light headed. The baby, his baby, his friend, his little sister was dying. She was dying and he was the only one who could save her.

"George!"

He snapped back to his mother when she shook him.

"Run …"

His mother shouted the same thing at him all the way down the steps. Her polished voice echoed desperately, helplessly, through the halls of Downton, maybe for hours, weeks, days, maybe till Judgment Day. He heard her as he put on his coat and hat. He heard her as he opened the glass door. It was the rowing cadence that worked little muscles to push open the heavy castle doors. It was the command that mixed in with the banshee's wail that met him when he hit the wall of solid cold air. Squinted little eyes were met with the bitten savageness of the elements and combating air pressure of hot and cold. And yet he heard the same thing in mind, heart, and soul.

" **Run, George, run!"**

Tom Branson, Lady Edith, Bertie Pelham, Lady Rose, and Atticus Aldridge could've all used a cup of hot coco at this point. When they had all met on the London train, they thought it a merry moment on such a fortuitous Christmas Eve. With Sybbie, Marigold, and Little Rachel with them, they had all spent a year away from Downton, busy with lives that were just starting out. Now that they were back, there was a certain feeling of home that was associated with the great house. It was a fortress built of the fondest of memories, in which they could hide away from the bustle of their world. There they could relax and once again rejoin one another's company.

But for all the merriment of the train ride, a great Christmas setting and early holiday celebration of excited chatter and joyful banter, they had found themselves in the aftermath of a storm. They were all standing in a great frosted winter land. They found themselves stranded at the station. It had been a long, frigid, hike through the icy, scenic, country, carrying their babies and luggage along the way. Mummy and Daddy switched every half a mile between baby and luggage, poor Tom Branson had both to haul, every once in a while, Edith volunteering to carry both Sybbie and Marigold in each arm.

It wasn't all too bad. Rose had kept their spirit up with silly none-sense talk that somehow always made everyone smile. If there was ever a bright light in the darkest places of the world it was the lovely Lady Rose. But while Edith reminded everyone that in a few years they'd all remember this fondly, all they wanted was the warm fires and golden hued foyers of Downton. By the time they had spotted the gates of the great estate, they all cheered as if they were attending a competitive rugby match. In just a dozen more frozen minutes, they'd be in the warmth of the grand country manor.

It was Sybbie that first spotted the boy. She wanted to be let down to run to him, but Tom told her to stay in her Aunt Edith's arms. She wasn't in the right boots to be running around in this deep of snow. Edith was overjoyed to see the boy streaking toward them, but questioned what on earth Mary and Mama were doing letting the boy out in this ghastly weather. Atticus and Bertie were of the same mind. But for Rose she dropped the luggage and squatted down with open arms to catch the speeding comet into her embrace.

"George!"

"Hello, Darling!"

"George …"

"George?"

"George?!"

The boy raced right by his aunts and uncles as if he didn't know them, didn't see them. The little lightening bolt flashed right past Rose's open arms and split Atticus and Bertie, charging toward the village faster than anyone had ever seen a young child run. Sybbie and Marigold both shouted for their cousin in the distance, but even his best friends in the whole world couldn't pierce the voice that was echoing through his single track mind.

"Where the devil is he going so fast?"

"Something's wrong …"

"You don't mean it, Tom?"

"I think he's right."

"Let's get there!"

Even in the quiet of the empty beds and cold halls, there was still the ghostly echo of coughing, sneezing, and wheezing that haunted the village hospital. Every weary nurse and doctor could still hear the clamor of patients and the full wards when they walked through the hospital doors. But with the new supply of medicine, and the frosting starting to break, they had successfully put away many of the cases, bleakly and tiredly.

Isabel Crawley Merton had just been mentioning to Doctor Clarkson that you really couldn't hear the noise of triage till it stops, when George came bursting through the doors. Isobel had been expecting to see her grandson when she, Lord Merton, and The Dowager went down for dinner that night, and she'd certainly see him again tomorrow morning. But none the less she was happy to see the everlasting testament to her beloved son's great love. Though she couldn't fathom what he was doing out in the cold this early in the morning, wearing Cora's scarf and Mary's gloves.

She had tried to hug him but was shocked when he pushed her away. The boy began muffled shouts about Cora, wrong medicine, and baby stimulants. He kept shouting it at his grandmother and Doctor Clarkson in alarm till they got the full message. Isobel rushed to the medicine cabinet, while Clarkson ranted in denial that what the boy was saying was impossible, informing Mrs. Merton that Cora Talbot had gotten her meds already. It was the only thing he'd ever say to anyone afterward. Fore when the board member opened the hospital cabinet, there on the shelf, was the pediatric vial with Cora Talbot's name on the label. Missing was the adult dosage of the same medicine.

Isobel was white as a sheet when she slowly looked back at Doctor Clarkson. She knew immediately what they had done, what had happened. Stunned mute, absent of any feeling in her shock, she met George's desperate request in a fog of routine, even putting both vials in a white pharmaceutical bag. There was no bidding farewell to a small boy she'd soon take guardianship over without contest. There was no apology from Doctor Clarkson who was horrified beyond rationality of the mistake they had made.

The board would eventually tell her it was an honest mistake, that it wasn't her fault, everyone gets old and that it was Lady Grantham's job to have seen that. But Isobel would never out live or down what happened that day. The poison of what will happen would age her overnight. And by Christmas Day she'd become a brooding, haunted, old woman, nearly unrecognizable in spirit or attitude.

Powder and frost kicked up behind tired little legs that sprinted past the gates of the estate one last time. The little boy's chest was on fire and ached so terribly, he couldn't feel his nose and there was something wet and hard crusting on the tips of his eyebrows. His face was red and raw, and painful to touch, but he kept going. He was almost there, he was almost home.

The child told himself that he would get there in time, he had too. That is how these things work. It'll be close, but then that was how it always went in the stories. But he'd make it, Thomas will give her the right drops, and everything will be fine again. And George Crawley would be a hero for once in his life.

The frozen gravel crunched and slushed under foot as his breath misted heavily, sputtering, as he rushed past the old bench under the great tree. He wanted to stop for just a second, to catch his breath, to sit down for just a moment, even just lean on the tree. But his mother's voice kept screaming at him, his sister's disoriented eyes haunted his mind, as did the parting look Anna had given him. It was the same look that everyone had always given George. It was one of sympathy, one of faithlessness. He was poor George Crawley, cursed since the day he was born the day his father died. Bless the heart of Little Master George who couldn't do anything right. But today that was going to change, today they'd all remember this Christmas forever …

And they would.

Someone had left one of the heavy double castle doors open. And when George rushed through he found snow flurries blowing inside, sticking to the carpeted floors and glass doors, melting in the heat. The boy was light headed, staggering when he stepped inside. The heat felt heavenly and foreign. He threw open the glass door with a violent bang and paused. The great foyer of Downton was dark to the boy's eyesight, as dark as it got. After being out in the bright hue of daylight and the glow of newly fallen snow, the inside of the stately manor was shadowy and filled with gloom. The only beacon was the giant, lit, Christmas tree that sat in the middle of the house.

In front of the grand staircase, whose railing was wrapped elegantly in garland and tinsel, gathered the downstairs staff. Mrs. Patmore was hugging Daisy. Mrs. Baxter was holding Mr. Mosley's hand. Mr. Carson was sitting on the steps, next to Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Bates kneeling next to him. Obviously the old butler wasn't sitting on the stairs voluntarily. Mrs. Hughes was rubbing the emotional man's chest with tears of her own.

George sprinted toward the group, using the Christmas lights to find his way through the crowd. He rushed past the fallen Butler, his wife, and the valet. Mr. Bates reached for him, but didn't commit to it. There was no use, no help in keeping him with the staff. There was no protecting him from what was up there. When George reached the first landing, he stopped. All of the eyes of the staff, everyone that made his world what it was, he could feel their eyes on his back. The boy stood silhouetted against the bright lights of Christmas for a long beat. He wanted to look back at all of them, but he couldn't. If the boy had done it, if he allowed himself to do so … then he'd know for sure.

He'd know he failed.

Skipping two steps all the way up, the hospital bag crinkling the whole way, George ran up the famous staircase. When he reached the overlook he saw that Henry Talbot was in the same place. He was weeping quietly, rocking back and forth, face buried into his knees. When George breathlessly jogged up, the man looked up from his silent sobbing. His step-father was almost unrecognizable. Grief had twisted the handsome face that was shadowed in the grand tree lights from below. His cheeks were soaked with tears, and there was no composure as he rocked back and forth. He gave only the briefest looks to the bag in the boy's hand. Something strangled escaped from his throat then. Whither it was a laugh, sob, or both, George would puzzle on it till the day he died. The man buried his face into his knees and took no more notice of the boy.

Little feet didn't halt till they had skidded smoothly to a stop amongst the small group of people that had gathered outside the nursery. The small child looked spent, exhausted, and cold. He was breathing heavily as he looked around him. Rose was shaking inaudibly, her face buried deeply into Atticus Aldridge's chest, his arms protectively holding the young woman to him. In the corner Robert Crawley was leaning his head against the corridor wall, his teary eyed daughter Edith, held him from behind tightly. From the moment the guests had been told what had happened, Lady Edith had asked Anna and Bertie to take the little girls to her room. It was an act of a quick thinking mother that would spare them nightmares. It was a mercy that would not be gifted to George.

Looking around, the boy found his mother. Lady Mary was on the floor outside the door. She looked lost in a world of pain that was so deeply internalized that she looked numbed to the world, to the very spectrum of human feelings. On one side of her, Tom Branson was on his knees, holding one of her hands, whispering heartfelt comforts. On the other side was Lady Grantham pressed tightly to Mary's side, petting her hair, burying her tear strewn face into her daughter's bare shoulder, kissing it comfortingly.

"Mama …" George panted heavily rushing in front of them. "Mama … I got it! I got the medicine!" He pulled down his granny's scarf and held the white bag out to her. There was never more urgency in the young child's voice, never had there been such courageous hope in dark blue eyes. It was just like the stories, everyone was sad, given up hope, but just then George would arrive and save the day. Cora was tied to the train tracks and George had the swashbuckler's saber that would cut her free just at the last moment.

But it was the last time the snow drenched boy would ever think of heroism again.

Red tinted eyes slowly lifted to examine the frozen child, caked in powder and frost. Her eyes focused on the white paper bag in his gloved hand. She stared at it for a long time, before she returned to the boy. Before she turned to this amalgamation of everything in her past that she loved so much, the people that would never let her down … till now. As long as he lived it would haunt him the way she looked at her son, her own child. It was sharp, venomous, and filled with hate. There were no words that needed to be spoken to communicate how disappointing he was at that very moment standing in front of her. The boy took a visible step back at his mother's reaction to seeing him, seeing all of them inside the boy who let her down. But the vicious gaze followed even as he retreated.

Lady Grantham noticed her grandson and was visibly stricken by his weathered and worn appearance. She saw the hospital bag in his tiny hands and slowly turned to Mary. It was a face that only had been used once in her life, when the son of a Turkish Ambassador was naked and lay dead in her eldest daughter's bed. She couldn't fathom, even in her grief, how anyone could do that to a child. How her own daughter could put that sweet girl's life on the shoulders of a small boy. Knowing what she did the moment she got to the nursery, the sheer impossibility of the doomed mission he had been sent on. The only thing that covered the horrible spotlights that was murdering the small boy's soul was Cora Crawley's gentle hand that cupped her girl's eyes and pulled her into the crook of her neck. It was an action that kept her venomous gaze off of the boy.

There was no comprehension of why she was mad, why she hated him. George had done exactly what she wanted him to do. He had run all the way to the village, he had gotten the medicine, and ran back. There was nothing more he could've done. He did what she wanted him to do. He stared at his mother and grandmother, the pale woman blindly pulling Tom's hand to her chest in sorrow. She needed everyone, all of her family, all of their love … everyone, except George.

Suddenly the nursery door opened. When the boy saw that it was Thomas, he quickly moved two steps, holding the hospital bag out toward him. But he stopped himself, halted any words that he might have said. Seeing the man walking out, his arms full, George stowed the bag in his buttoned coat. He followed the man with his gaze, watching the item in his arms.

She looked like she was sleeping.

There were many things that came to mind as he watched Thomas carry her away. He remembered the day she was born, sitting at the table with the rest of the men of the family. Donk had his hands behind his back as he stared out the window, Bertie counting cigars, Uncle Tom making jokes to crack a smile out of a nervously sweating Henry. George had joined Donk at the window, copying him. The older man looked down, smiled, and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder as the Lord and his Heir shared the view. When Anna came down the stairs, smiling, they knew that she had come through it. He still remembered Henry turning to him. "Shall we go see?" He had asked as he lifted the boy and carried him up the stairs.

He remembered every giggle, cry, smile, and tear that had been shed since that late night he curled up in his mother's lap and held the baby for the first time. The way the baby used to quiet as he began reading his books to her, making the voices to get a response out of her. How she'd reach for him, when no one else had. All of it was flashing through his mind as he watched Thomas solemnly tread down the hall with what remained of all the happiest of the most innocent loves. But the thing that got to him most, that would tear him to pieces some nights, rip him hollow on others, through the long hard years that would follow this day. After everything he had done, all the hardships, and doomed charges made on behave of the beautiful little baby whose picture only conjured joy, happiness, and contentment in his darkest, loneliest times.

George never got to say goodbye.

When Thomas was gone, the family had cleared away. Tom and Cora helped Mary to her feet and walked her to her room. Atticus and Rose followed, both mother and father, desperately needing the company of their own little girl in the private of Rose's old room. Edith helped her father, neither letting go of the other as they walked away to help Mary in any way they could. With Tom's help, even Henry was helped back to his feet and escorted to another part of the house.

But for one last time, forgotten in the vortex that Lady Mary had drawn around her in grief, was George Crawley. Soon enough, the small boy, windblown, cold, covered in the elements, found that he was utterly alone. He stared inside the empty nursery where so many happy memories had lived from Sybbie and Marigold, to the baby. Slowly, sadly, he slid his hat off the side of his head, letting his curls fall wildly out.

With head hung low in grievous defeat, he trudged away to his lonesome room at the end of the hall.

"You forgot this …"

George turned his head morosely to find a young woman standing in a satin gown of pearl and jet. Her long raven tresses were pinned back stylishly. The small child and elegant youth had matching eyes, curls, and vaguely similar features. He didn't know the woman, but George had stopped questioning the randomness of high born guests that stayed at the estate while passing through or attended dinner. In her silky gloved hands was George's book.

The boy walked up to the girl. There was something deeply broken about the way he stared at the book in her hand. It was about airplane racing, and it was the baby's favorite. Mostly because George would read off the tactics, and somewhere in the middle, he'd orate and reenact mesmerizing races and dogfights that he made up to entertain himself and the baby. Whenever she saw the blue and gold cover, she'd bounce her little knees and laugh, knowing that a good story was coming.

A single tear drop fell on the book cover as the boy took it from the beautiful young woman. "Thank you …" There was nothing but heart break in the quiet little voice. He placed the book under arm and turned to leave.

The girl reached out and grabbed him back as gentle as could be imagined. She sank to her knees in front of him, coming eye level with the most broken of hearts that had ever been seen. She cupped his cold face in her warm gloved hands.

"You don't have to worry about her anymore … not anymore." She shook her head, rubbing a silky thumb over his wet cheek.

George sniffed hard. "I wish I still could." He sobbed.

The woman shed a single tear as she folded the boy in her arms and held him close. She kissed his temple the way her mother had once done to her, the way she had only done once for her own girl, before death had claimed her just down the hall. But the boy she held was so very close to that kind of absolution. George cried quietly in the arms of a woman that he squished tightly against, but didn't know, or would remember years later …

Even over a shared cup of coffee.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _Wildfire" – Michael Martin Murphy_


	8. Born in the USA

_**14 Years Ago**_

 _There are very few instances in time in which it passes so slowly as when one was in grief. The Greeks had a story for such as the bleakness of winter, when nothing grew. They had an explanation for the times when the darkness came swiftly after a cold, grey, day that was much less the same as the one before. It was the story of Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of Harvest and all that grew from the earth._

 _It told of how one day the princess of the god's drifted into a great wild field of green, there she picked the lovely flowers that her mother had so generously oversaw as a gift to her beloved girl. And while she enjoyed a life of joy and peace, bringing happiness to all on Olympus, she was being stalked … Stalked by death himself. One moment a mother, so proud, watched on with joy at the beautiful glimmer of pure light, wandering the lush grounds she had cultivated just for her. The next a pit opened, burning asunder everything she had grown and cared for so carefully, and in one foul swoop all her joy, everything she loved, was stolen by the plutonian hand of the blackest of envy. The sweetest of souls, the most joyous of beauties, was stolen from her mother's arms and heart. She was dragged down below earth to be made the trophy of the blackest places, the princess of sorrow, and the very queen of the dead. So hard, so completely, did Demeter give over to grief of the loss of her daughter that the world became dark. The winds went cold, and all that grew in the good earth, died._

 _What was the point, when the one person you did it all for was stolen from you?_

 _In the village of Downton they had all grown to know the bleakness of this loss, of this tragedy. For here, a mother had also lost all the light and beauty that was the very future of a family. It was a feeling, a mood that filled those around the great estate whose curse could be felt like the chill of an ice-burg whose cold skimmed off the surface with each howl of the wind. No one had gone or come from there that did not dwell its halls. Overnight, the stately manor seemed to have gone to ruin. Downton Abbey had been so completely devastated by death that it looked like one of the many abandoned and haunted palaces of long ago that presided along the English countryside. It was the haunt of ghosts of a dead way of life. In the starless, black of the night, the phantom clacking of ghostly steeds could still be heard carrying grand and royal carriages to the very gates for parties and balls of the likes not to be seen in the generations after the war. No one believed that anybody lived there … and why would they?_

 _Everything good and pure had long been stolen from that place._

 _But it wasn't just the 'Big House'; it was the whole village that was changing. If you had a sick child, if you had a stubbed toe, a pain that was bothering you for weeks. There was a bus that went to Ripon and Thirsk, it would be more expensive, and more of a hassle, but you could trust the doctors in the town. But if you stay in Downton, whatever happens, it was your own fault._

 _The men from York had arrived weeks ago. They started with the non-essential wings and rooms. There was an auction for some of the beds and the outdated equipment. Where the money went too? No one was quite sure. But it didn't matter to anyone who it would matter too. The rest was inventoried and sent to a warehouse in Ripon, in case some other branch in Yorkshire needed a spare. But this week they had hung up fliers around the village that it was time for what they had warned in the town meeting last month. It was transition day for Downton. Ripon was a good place for going if you suffer from a physical injury, being such an industrial town. Thirsk has a great General Medicine staff, not too many specialty doctors, but if you need a check-up they'll catch it for you. Why go to London when York has the best hospitals for what ails you? But as of today, there would be no hospital in Downton. Today was the last day._

 _The halls that had once been so overcrowded in the war. That had always been the scene of some great drama amongst the local farmers and tenants. The institution that had catered to so many people spending their final days, hours, and moments in these old halls, the only place of care they'd ever known … and now it was empty. Almost a century of providing for a village, for the county, and dozens of farms and their generations were now reduced to one single bed in the main ward with a drawn privacy curtain. There on the table, the last patient to ever be treated in Downton giggled, kicking his little feet playfully at the fingers that examined him._

 _There was something broken hearted in the eyes of the haunted older woman that stood over the toddler. Isobel Crawley Merton had devoted fifteen years out of the century's worth of the Hospital's existence. She could still recall her very first case, in this very ward, when she first arrived. A farmer named John Drake who had dropsy. It was her first battle with her best friend the Dowager, it was the first time she walked through those doors, and it was the first time in so long she felt as if she could make a difference. She had saved that man's life. It had been so long now since she had thought of John Drake. A part of her wondered if she might go look him up. But then she'd think about it and know that she never would. Seeing him at some barn, pulling stumps with his tractor, surrounded by playing grandchildren, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't redeem what had happened._

 _It wouldn't redeem her._

 _Anna and John Bates stood together by the bed watching Mrs. Merton with their child. They exchanged looks, a wordless conversation, under the shadow of such unbreakable sorrow and guilt on the handsome woman's face. They had come to see Doctor Clarkson one last time. He had been the boy's doctor, he had been both his parent's doctor for so long. It didn't seem right here on the last day, when they were closing the hospital, when Clarkson was retiring, not to let him do one last check-up. No one believed that he had done anything on purpose, all the ills of Christmas was a mistake. They didn't want to play politics of the house with their child's care, and after all these years both Anna and John thought that they owed everyone at the hospital one last show of their good faith. Sadly, they were informed that Doctor Clarkson wouldn't be seeing any more patients … period._

 _Anna's strikingly warm eyes gazed over to the edge of the bed. There, a small boy sat perched. There was a deep brooding look to a child that shouldn't know of such sorrow. Yet, George Crawley looked to be lost in another world, a world that no one so young should live in. He stared at John Jr. with a look of recognition and sadness. Of course he had known JJ since the day he was born. Master George had been to their little house many times, accompanying Anna to retrieve something she had forgotten. And JJ Bates liked Master George so very much. They were friends. But then you put any baby in front of George Crawley and they liked him. Even the small bump in the Lady's Maid's belly stirred when he was around. But the reason that George was staring so dejectedly at the jolly little soul next to him was the same reason that Anna didn't talk of the baby, or bring him to work. Because when George saw John Jr. he was reminded all too freshly of everything that was missing._

 _The pretty blond placed a hand on her baby lump. "What will you do with your time?" She asked awkwardly._

 _When Isobel looked up, Anna had to fight the urge to let her eyes go glassy. The nurse looked so completely lost, so bewildered by simple human interaction. She didn't even comprehend what Anna had just said to her. There was no sign of the strong willed woman that constantly was the thorn to the side of her own family. No more was the push back against Violet and Robert Crawley, or the great worker for the greater good. In front of Anna and her husband was an old woman who lived in a fog of instinct. She had no thought or piece of mind beyond the work in front of her. Isobel Crawley seemed to have gone away with her step-granddaughter, and there was very little that could bring her back._

 _Even since Isobel decided to move back to Crawley House, Master George in tow, nothing changed. Isobel thought it might clear her head to be somewhere familiar, with her grandson, but it didn't seem to be helping anyone. Mrs. Merton spent her days lost in paperwork, or in foggy one-sided conversations with the Dowager Countess, forgotten was her own husband who worried for her from afar. Meanwhile George had merely sat by the window and stared out at the gardens._

 _Master George had been cast out of Downton, though no one would say it. Lady Mary didn't want to see him, and Lord and Lady Grantham had agreed that the estate was no place for the boy at the moment. So he woke up one day to find that his things had been packed up and was ordered to his father's empty house. No one downstairs thought it the right moment, or even right at all. It sent a bad message to the boy, like he was being punished, court marshaled for failing his impossible mission. Lady Edith had been livid when she saw the suitcases. Anna could hear the yelling from downstairs. But Lady Mary had always gotten what Lady Mary wanted. There were no heights that Mary Josephine Crawley wouldn't climb for the ones she loved and there was no depth she'd sink to when she thought they had betrayed her. She didn't want to see Henry any more than she wanted to see her own child. Tom Branson had been trying to keep him busy in London._

 _Yet the irony often brought Anna Bates to tears in the privacy of her own home, in the arms of her husband and the clutch of her child, when she saw Lady Mary sitting by her window in grieving. It was the exact same thing that, across the village, her son was doing in his father's favorite spot. If they had only understood that, knew that, maybe it would've helped._

 _If they could just share their grief together …_

" _I don't know, really … a Lady of the County has so much to do I … I suppose." The woman finally answered Anna. When she flashed a smile, it was hollow and unfeeling. Isobel was broken and there was no hiding it on the last day of her medical career, on the last day of her hospital, and on the last day of the only life she had ever known._

 _The woman turned to her grandson. He had often accompanied his grandmother these days on her final rounds. He had helped her with the little things, being an assistant when she asked for a tool. Between helping Isobel on her last weeks and Mosley's lessons, anything that kept him away from Matthew's brooding spot that his son had made a home._

" _George … I seemed to have forgotten my stethoscope. Can you go to my office and get it for me?" She asked kindly._

 _Anna felt ashamed about the uncomfortable shift in her posture when the word "Forgotten" was uttered. It was caught by Isobel in the corner of her eyes. She quickly whirled in a sudden panic. She held her hands out to the parents of the smiling toddler in front of her._

" _Please … I, it's only a stethoscope, I, I honestly didn't mean to leave it. I just didn't expect to be seeing patients." She explained hurriedly. The nurse knew what everyone was saying, what everyone thought about her after last month._

 _Anna shook her head. "No, M'Lady, it's fine. I completely understand." The maid shook her head and tried to forgive and ask to be forgiven all at the same time. The two women began talking over one another trying to accomplish the same goals._

 _Reaching through the wall of noise and chatter was the always steady hand of Mr. Bates. Quietly he stepped forward, with a click of his cane, and placed a hand on Isobel's arm. Both women quieted and watched the quiet man with bird like features smile very kindly and very reassuringly._

" _It's fine, I assure you." He nodded._

 _After a long moment, Isobel did the same, tears forming in her eyes. It had been the first time anyone, especially herself, had forgiven her from a lapse in thought. It was the first people to have forgiven her period. She knew she didn't deserve the kindness, but she appreciated it all the same._

" _Thank you." She grabbed the man's hand and squeezed it, nodding brokenly to the blond pregnant woman who returned it sympathetically._

 _George leapt from the bed and slowly made his way out of the ward. Before he went out the door, he turned back to JJ, who wibbled in disappointment at the boy's leaving. He stared at the itty bitty fellow for a long beat. And for a moment he felt the old feelings that used overcome him when he saw_ _ **her**_ _. She was a baby girl who used to screech and screech, till he came into the room. He would leap up and lean over the railing of the crib. He'd give her the look that his mother used give him when he did something amusing but naughty. The baby would quiet, chewing on her thumb in caution. But she would giggle when he'd lean down and kiss her. She had gotten his attention, which was what she had wanted in the first place._

 _A tear fell from his little eyes that he cleaned away with the sleeve of his jacket. With a sniff he left the room and into the corridors of the empty hospital. Walking back to the administration offices, the boy looked through the open doors of the hospital. There was nothing but empty rooms, with windows that were painted shut against the elements. It wasn't a foreign sight to him. George Crawley was becoming accustomed to the sight of empty places._

 _It was hard to remember what had happened after his family had left him on Christmas. But he remembered waking up in his Granny and Donk's bed. His grandfather's back was to him as he slept, but as he turned around in confusion, he found his granny was wide awake. Someone had carried him to their bedroom and laid him in between them. She seemed to think that he had come on his own, but he didn't remember walking over. But it didn't matter, because his granny had snuggled the boy to her chest tight. Nuzzling his curls, she whispered to him over and over again that it wasn't his fault. That nothing was his fault today. It should've been enough, but it wasn't. Because, whether he had come on his own or someone had relocated him, he still felt the same sorrow. Sybbie, Marigold, even Rachel. They were all sleeping with someone, a mommy, a daddy, both. But the reason that George was in between his Granny and Donk, was because he was cursed, because he wasn't fast enough, and because after that day …_

 _His mama didn't love him anymore._

 _There were no tears in his eyes on New Year's Eve, any protests, or fear when he left his Grandparent's room that morning to find his clothes in suitcases and his books in boxes. After a week of sleeping with his grandparents, of not seeing his mother, he finally got confirmation of everything he knew she felt. His Uncle Tom had said that it should wait, his Aunt Edith was furious, and his Aunt Rose just smiled at him, hoping to reassure him through her trademark charm and beauty. But Lord Grantham had claimed that the manor was no place for a boy, too many bad memories, too much grief. Grantham House in the village, surrounded by town life would help him. His Granny had stood in solidarity with Donk, but remained silent on the matter of if it was the right thing to do. Even as his Aunt Edith had to be held back from storming up the stairs to get at her sister, claiming that this scheme had Mary's harpy's talon marks all over it. But George agreed to leave his mother's house, for his father's old one, if it's what his mother wanted. As they carried away his things and took them ahead to the house, George had decided to walk down by himself with his duffle of the most important things. His granny had picked him up and kissed him, saying that it wasn't forever, just for a little while._

 _Placing his cap on his head, bag slung across his back, accompanied by no one, George turned one last time to look over the house that would be his someday. There on the steps, for the first time since Christmas, he saw his Mama. She wore a sleek, tight, black silk dress, and was as pale as he had ever seen anyone before. The ghostly vision of ice cold beauty was watching him from afar as he held open the glass door. Their gaze had met from across the room. She hadn't shed a tear since they had last seen one another. It so happened that Lady Mary Crawly was going about her daily routine like it had been before Cora, before Henry … before George. Yet, for a moment, for a heartbeat there seemed to be a reprieve, a deep sorrow, and self-disgust to the woman on the steps. He thought she might have run to him, told him to put the bag back in her room and they'd speak no more of this. But there was nothing but a rustle of a fashion magazine. She smirked at something she read and walked to the library were everyone was waiting for her, just her._

 _It was the last time he had seen his mother. And it would be the last time George Crawley would live at Downton Abbey for many years afterward._

 _The rooms in the back of the hospital were inhospitably frigid. Accumulation of snow and ice had thawed very little and continued to contribute to the unbearable cold of the hard winter. It also didn't help that they had shut off the heat for the last few days of the hospital's existence. It had been a mix up in paper work, but it seemed like a coldly undignified end to such a known institution locally. With a visible breath in the grey light, the small boy walked to his grandmother's office._

" _I'm sorry … Please, I … you don't know how much I'm sorry … I honestly thought …!"_

 _ **BOOM!**_

 _The hollowed out emptiness of the country hospital made the noise sound like a cannon firing. One second George heard a man desperately apologizing, the next he was covering his ears at the exploding sound that shook the administration hall of the closed hospital. The world had grown incredibly silent with nothing but a buzzing through his tiny ears._

 _Still as a woodland animal sensing danger around him, George held his ground. Being afraid didn't quite describe the terror the boy felt standing alone in the empty hall. He had been lucky that he had gone to pee before Anna and Bates had brought JJ over. If it had been only weeks before hand, he would've ran right for his mama, for his Donk, for Granny, for Thomas. But George felt now, after his failure at Christmas, that he had to look after himself. That somehow he had to find a way to resolve this danger without anyone, because he was a_ _ **lost cause**_ _to anyone that mattered._

 _Making a dash for his Grandmother's office might have been his best chance, but he never got there. A new sound was echoing down the abandoned corridors. It was a familiar sound to the boy. It was the sound that filled his mind, heart, and soul for weeks. It was the same sounds that he knew that he had wanted to make himself so many times if he had a right to them, if it hadn't been his fault for everything._

 _It was the sound of hysterical sobbing._

 _Hiding, running, even just sheltering in place was the only options that should've been going through the boy's head. But when he heard the sobbing, the sheer suffering that came from the pain that tore through the cold stillness of the empty halls, it drew him toward it. The bravery of a father, the kindness of an aunt, and the flaunting of not giving a "fig" about convention from a mother coursed through the boy's veins. A mixture of personalities that haunted and conceived a soul made George Crawley the kind of person that always ran toward danger rather than away from it._

 _Following the tormented sounds, the boy tracked it close by. It was coming from right next to his Grandmother's door, in Doctor Clarkson's office. Carefully, quietly, the boy crept on the balls of his feet toward the cracked open door. George peaked through the sliver of space, holding his breath. He couldn't see anything, only the same paper weights and mess of research papers and medical journals that littered the work space. It spoke to a doctor trying desperately to find something wrong with himself. He was a man hoping, praying, for a disease, for a condition that would explain such a grievous tragedy that had come from his own hands, his own mistake._

 _Pushing it open a little more, the boy had gone as pale as his Mama. A roller chair was shoved back against the far wall, and in it was a slumped figure. Doctor Clarkson had more white in his hair than blond. The mix of the two had given it a frosted look. His crystal eyes were blank, looking up at the angled corner of the far ceiling, unblinking. There was a scattered collection of bloody holes that tore the Doctor's chest into shreds. Two had gone so far through that George could see the blood soaked wooden paneling of the wall._

 _No matter how many Turkish Bounty Hunters, Arabs, and SS Storm Troopers his father's revolver had cut down. No matter how many Nazi and Egyptian pilots he'd shoot down throughout his life. There'd never be a worse sight than the brutality of the first he ever saw, the murdered corpse of Richard Clarkson. It would be a sight he'd spend the rest of his days running from in his nightmares._

 _Sobbing continued from the corner of the room. The door was still ajar enough for the boy to see the desk and the body of the doctor, but not enough to see into the room properly. Gently as possible, the boy pushed the door open slowly. Craning his small head from around the frame, he surveyed the anatomy cross-sectioned posters and charts on the wall, a fake skeleton, and a white privacy blinder. He didn't stop till he reached the far corner, where the tormented sounds came from._

 _The right tube of the double barrel shotgun was still smoking as it lay in front of the crumpled figure that rocked back and forth in the corner. Henry Talbot had his face buried into his knees, his chest heaving in the same broken, irrational, emotions that went through the mad fits of all parents who had lost a child, lost a family that had barely started. It would be a question never asked by friends and family as to what led Henry to seek revenge against the man who accidently murdered his daughter. The police wouldn't pry. There was enough tragedy and scandal to go around without making their job harder._

 _George's eyes were wide as he watched the man suffering in his private hell. He tried to correlate the images of the man who used to give him rides on his shoulders, who let him play with his Mama's stamper in her and Uncle Tom's office. Taking drives, race car Grand Prix with Uncle Tom and Sybbie, this was the Henry that George knew. And that Henry was not a man who could've done this. To the boy, this broken thing was as much a stranger, as any other person George walked by on the street. In his confusion, the boy pushed the door, making it creek. His breath caught as the man suddenly looked up._

 _Henry's eyes were swollen and red, his cheeks wet with salty tears. He looked thirty years older and disheveled. It was as if he had been sleeping on the streets or in his car, lost on a mindless, meandering, road trip somewhere between here and London for weeks. But for George, it was like being confronted with a wild animal that he didn't know. Unsure of if it was going to attack him. So the boy remained very still._

" _George?" The man asked hoarsely, squinting at the tiny figure._

 _The boy fearfully nodded._

 _It was in the boy's look, in the complete alien way he had treated the man he had gotten to know so well over a year and a half, that Henry had a deep moment of clarity through all the fog and pain of grief. He saw himself the way George saw him, the way Clarkson had seen him before he blew him away. A loss of complete control, a loss of a daughter, of a wife, of a life, had led him to this. A man could only run from the past so long, before he rounds around to where every pain that plagued Henry Talbot started … at the firing of a gun._

" _Oh god … oh my god, what have I done?" He searched himself in sobriety._

 _He was crying again. There was something resign, something so shameful in it. The sight of a grown man sitting here crying in front of a frightened boy. There was no forgiveness for exposing such a small child to this savagery, to this horror, the very things in war that had made him into this broken thing that ran out of gas before crossing the finish line. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and there had never been much fight in him. Henry Talbot had come to the end of his rope and had ruined too many lives to truly think of the run, good or bad, that he had._

" _George …" he said as calmly as possible. "I dare say … I, mmm … Did I see Mr. Bates come into the hospital?" He asked with a hard sniff._

 _The boy gave another traumatized nod._

" _Would you please get him for me, sir?" He gave a rough smile._

 _Slowly George walked backward out the door, but paused when he saw Clarkson's dead body again. His eyes were wide, his frame trembling. The shock was starting to wear off and he was starting to come face to face with the brutal reality of human nature. It was a lesson he was learning young … too young._

" _Don't mind him, Chap … just get Mr. Bates if you will."_

 _The voice was calm and very Henry, despite the sight, despite the sniffle and higher octave in his shaky voice. It was enough to break the spell that Doctor Clarkson's dead eyes had cast over the boy. Trembling, the small child exited the room, closing the door behind him. He stood outside for a beat or two. The sight of the body haunted every synapse, breath, and heartbeat. He was trembling from shoe to curls, terrified of the grotesquery that had been right in front of him. When Cora had died, she had looked like she was sleeping, but Doctor Clarkson was brutal, it was vicious, it was awful beyond George's reckoning of possibilities._

 _Slowly and steadily, afraid, upset, and feeling helpless, the boy made his way back to where he came from. It saddened him most to think that Henry didn't think that he had any other way. That he chose to do this thing, this violent, brutal thing, in the name of the tiniest little soul that had been pure and innocent. It was hard to put the two together, the giggles and the blood, the bounces and the permanent stillness. It tore him deep inside to know that someday all anyone would remember about his beautiful baby sister is what her father had done._

 _ **BOOM!**_

 _George flinched one last time. The final cannon shot roared down the empty hallway. He covered his ears, his knees shuttered, while the warped noise waved down the narrow passage. Quickly, George swung behind him, back to the doctor's office. There was a long pause, his hands cupping his ears, as he stared at the source of the noise. There was a sound of a slumping thud of dead weight from behind the door. Slowly the boy lowered his hands to his side, engulfed by the deafening sound of silence that thundered around him._

 _On that quiet early morning, heart heavy and filled with pain, George Crawley hung his tiny head, and headed back the way he came._

* * *

 **Born in the USA**

 _ **Now**_

The sound of engines and cannon fire was still buzzing in his ears. His senses still shimmied with the buzzing of the motor, and the air was still bitterly cold around him. Yet, he was stationary, unmoving, and there was nothing but darkness till a great light penetrated with flashes and feelings from the past and present. It felt like he was in two different worlds at once. Where he should be and where he wanted to be. One was a world of reality. The other was a world of dreams, dreams that were memories and memories that were dreams. A world in which he was still high above the clouds, but a familiar voice was humming a lullaby to him. He was a small child and a grown man all at the same time, lying with his head in the lap of a young woman who loved him. Her silky gloved hand stroked his curls, as she lulled him to sleep on one awful Christmas morning. He had no memory of the rest of that day, and yet something told him of a woman staying by his side, kissing him, and lying in her warm embrace as they stared at the ceiling. All the while she hummed to him his father's favorite song in the whole world.

Then, slowly, the dream world of lost memories faded, the humming voice of the nurse died. He felt her lean down and kiss him softly, lovingly, but her lap turned to a cushioned surface that smelt of hard leather. Then someone picked up the lyrics of what she had been humming.

" _Sometimes when I feel bad  
and things look blue  
I wish a pal I had... say one like you.  
Someone within my heart to build her throne  
Someone who'd never part, to call my own"_

The young man knew the words, knew the song, but it had been a long time since anyone had sung it. There was an importance to the melody that he couldn't quite remember. It had been his father's favorite song, and there was a reason for it. There had been some story that went along with it. But Matthew Crawley had been far from his son's thoughts for quite a number of years. The sad truth was that the young man didn't even know what his father looked like anymore. There had been faded pictures, but he hadn't seen them in years, not even when he returned from America.

He stirred, touching his lip with his gloved hand where the young woman had kissed him chastely. Were as her voice had been lulling him to sleep, the man's voice had been slowly waking the youth to the land of the living. He groaned and slowly opened his dark blue eyes. There he was confused as he looked up at the vast fields of shiny and twinkling stars in the cloudless sky. To the milky hue that stained the twinkling curtain of night, he was transfixed. It was such a vast and beautiful sight, coming after such hard memories, that for a moment, George Crawley would've believed that he was dead.

" _If you were the only girl in the world  
and I were the only boy  
Nothing else would matter in the world today  
We could go on loving in the same old way"_

But slowly the heat and flickering light next to him brought back reality. With a grown he turned his head to find a campfire snapping and crackling. It was built on forest brush and low hanging branches that burned off a damp smell of vegetation. He covered his eyes away from the harshness of the lit fire. The patterns and flickering shapes of the ever moving flames made him dizzy.

Slowly he sat up, as the singing continued close by. He made a grunt as he met the strain of being upright in the aftermath a massive air battle. An afternoon of barrel rolls and inverted dives, then lying down, pillowed on a beautiful girl's lap for hours, made just sitting up on your own power hard. It also didn't help that he was seeing weird and leaning shapes that came double from hazy vision and shadowed darkness of early twilight. But slowly things came to view, or at least one thing did.

A man sat perched on a log on the other side of the fire. He was in a familiar olive drab officer's uniform from the last Great War. A tin helmet was placed next to him. He had slicked back blond hair that was parted neatly. He was pale and handsome, in a bookish way. His crystal eyes were focused on something in his hands. His mind was cast a field with tragic nostalgia of the fondest memories of some great love that brought joy and pain to his singing voice. It was an item of great worth in his hand, an item that he had seemingly been parted with for so long.

" _I would say such wonderful things to you  
There would be such wonderful things to do  
If you were the only girl in the world  
and I were the only boy."_

George watched him for a dragging moment, but then he saw what was in his hands. The first reaction was to check his jacket pocket. When he found it empty, his next was instinct built on a year traveling through America during a depression, riding the rails, and sleeping in Hoovervilles around hobo fires.

The revolver cleared leather with a flick that caught the man's attention. The soldier seemed alarmed not at the weapon trained on him, but how smoothly, how expertly, the pilot handled it. One might have mistaken the youth for a gun slinger of the American "Old West" when he drew the click of its trigger.

" _That_ belongs to me."

Danger, the very essence of it, was in the youth's American voice at the sight of his oldest and most prized possession in another's hands. It might have been an overreaction to any man and or woman in the County of Grantham, in any rural county of Yorkshire, much less England. But for someone who had fought for their food, to hold on to what they had, in the lost forests of Louisiana, on the snowy cotton strewn country roads of Mississippi, and in the backstreets of San Antonio, most would've been dead for trying to take another's possessions while sleeping. Stranded in a hard country after the Stock Market Crash took the fortune supporting him overnight, George Crawley learned to guard what he had by any means necessary from the desperate men and woman left with as much nothing as him.

"Easy, my chap, I was just admiring it." The officer reasoned with calm in his voice that was almost priestly.

He held his pale hands out defenselessly to show that he was unarmed. There was something in the man's voice that was reverent and familiar with the young man that was set completely on edge. It was as if he knew George, or at least thought he should.

There was no fear in the man's eyes, which was strange for the young fighter with the weapon pointed at the man. He had been killing men all day, and he knew the stench, of death, and the fear of it. But there was neither of it on the stranger in question. It was if he knew that George wasn't going to harm him, or at least shoot him for such a minor offense. On principle the young man thought he should at least take a thumb, to keep him honest. But there was something in the man's eyes, something as familiar to the RAF Ace, as the man seemed familiar with him.

"Admire it from afar …" George motioned the man to toss the item over with his head.

The man seemed somewhat disappointed. It was not in that he was being robbed of the item. In fact he seemed more than happy to return it, for George to have it. He was disappointed that the racer pilot didn't seem to know who he was or even suspect. And more the pity, he still hadn't lowered the revolver. Cautiously he crouched from the log he was perched on. Balling the item in his hands, he gave a wordless warning of its flight under barrel, before he tossed it over the flames.

George caught the mostly ruined stuffed great dame. The heavy, bejeweled collar gave the cleaved stuffed cotton, held together by a strip of ancient cloth, enough weight to be tossed and caught. Taking his eyes off the man, he stuck a thumb into the dog's cotton guts.

"Or what's left of it, anyway." George added with a mournful sigh.

It had been a beloved gift from a little girl's grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate General who married a Jewish Millionaire. The toy was stuffed by raw cotton from a plantation in New Orleans that was supported by a fortune in Cincinnati Dry Goods. When the beautiful and sleek Cora Levinson married into the agriculturally supported English Estate, she was right at home. George's granny was just another Levinson married to keep the fields running, and one more Self-Made Southern Belle that set up shop on 5th Avenue and built a Newport Mansion with her father's money. All of it to impress a British Lord that would save her from Knickerbocker society hags and molesting Carpet Baggers after her charm, beauty, and the family plantation.

With the item secured in his possession, the man drew forward the hammer of the gun. He lowered it easily, holstering it with a twirling gun-fighter flourish as a showy warning to the stranger. The soldier seemed amused by the spinning gun. It was a type of superiority in showy confidence that a woman he knew so well and loved would've done in the early days of their acquaintance. There was something that bugged George about the man, but he couldn't say what it was.

He looked at the ruins of his most prized possession in his palms. It had been his oldest companion through all of the toughest times in his life. He had been fiercely protective and possessive of it. Anyone who had come to know George Crawley knew that not just anyone could touch the stuffed dame. It was more than just a little girl's plaything. It was something that connected him to home, a real home. It was proof that, once, long ago, there were two people that had loved one another. They had loved so deeply, so immaculately, that they moved heaven and earth to create a soul, a new life that ever cemented this true love's existence. The dog had been a great talisman, a beacon that had been instrumental in that love …

And now it was gone.

But it wasn't just the dog. It was the stress, anger, and all the violence of the day's events catching up with the pilot. No matter how good, true, virtuous, and valiant hearted a man could be, when you have killed, when you have lost, there's a darkness that infects one's soul. And today George Crawley had killed many men and lost almost all of his. Rogue Squadron had been completely wiped out after today's action. Friends and family, their broken bodies and burnt planes littered the hillsides, woods, and fields of his family's land. After a lifetime of hardship and even harder choices, it didn't get worse than the dark and guilty feelings that George felt tonight.

George bowed his head, all the emotions welling up inside him. It had been one of the worst days of his life. All of his friends were dead, Atticus was roasting in a crater somewhere, and his mother and father's great treasure had been destroyed. Cradling the destroyed toy had been the last straw. His chest heaved as he made sobbed breaths, burying his nose and mouth with a childlike nuzzle of the torn Great Dame. There in the private company of the crackling fire and the woods, the youth expelled the darkness within him. All the sorrow and guilt of all the people he couldn't save that day. He felt as conflicted as he once had as a small boy. They had all been relying on him to make things right …

And he had failed again.

The soldier watched the young man across from him with emotions watering his reddening crystal eyes. There were no words to describe the pain, the sight, of the defeat youth on the ground made the man feel. This wasn't the life he had thought that the youth would be leading. He had prayed so many times that he'd not know this pain. But it seemed to have found George anyway. What hurt him most was that there was no one there. That somehow he was so very alone in his darkest moment. It tore his heart out to see it, if not to feel it so very much.

He had also fought a war. He had been an officer, with his own platoon, his own good company. There was knowledge of what it was like to lose men in the most brutal, violent, and unforgiving ways that weighed heavily on one's conscious. But he had always, for all that, had somewhere to go, to retreat too. His longing, his desires, and the desperate need for his one great love, all of it kept him occupied from the horror of the harsh and inhuman realities of his bloody struggle. She kept him going, her cold smile, her deep red tinted eyes, and just the sound of her haughty voice. She and all of her qualities and flaws that made up the very fiber of his soul which weighed more than all the horrors of mud, shell, and trench that rose head high all those terrible years. But he had come into a world in which that same beauty, charm, elegance, and love did not exist for the youth as it had for him. He was alone in the world, abandoned by that great love of the man's, with no place to go home too from the struggle. There were no words to be given to a young man who wouldn't know what to do with advice from experiences that was so sorrowfully foreign to him. So all the soldier could do was sit by, and be there. No sage advice, no great gesture, not even a spoken truth. He simply sat on his log and waited with the ace pilot, waited with tears and guilt of his very own. Guilt of knowing he had abandoned this young man on the day he was born …

He had left him to experience this day, and many others like it, all on his own.

It was some time later that George finally came up for air. A single tear streaked down his stubbled cheek. His gaze found the man sitting across from the fire, focusing on him like a laser. The man was just as emotional, twisting in his spot, wanting to say something, wanting to do something. Looking just as much like a failure, as George felt inside. He opened his mouth to speak, but it came out empty as the youth looked away. Neither knew what was more shameful. Was it the grown man watching another lose composure in sadness? Or was it the thinking of it as shameful to show emotion in front of someone who had loved the youth so very much.

With a hard clear of the youth's throat and a sniff, George wiped his eyes with the worn navy blue scarf around his neck. There was no use in the feeling of defeat. It wouldn't do him any good out here. He had found himself in these desperate situations so many times before, and it could always be worse. With one or two more hard breaths, he filed the break down away for another day, pocketing his ruined good luck charm. He gave a look at the dark woods around him. Just over the crackle of the popping fire was the sound of chitterling crickets and hooting owls in the distance.

"How long have I been out?"

His emotion was replaced by stony seriousness as he began undoing the flack vest, slipping it off. George finally acknowledged the man sitting across the fire from him. His voice was calmer, scratchier, and darker than before. He had come to a resolve, come to realize, like so many times before in many different, harder, countries than this, that he was gonna have to make do. He couldn't wait around, and no one was gonna come for him.

He was in survivor mode.

"A few hours …" The soldier watched the pilot throw the yellow vest into the fire with puzzlement.

"And what are you supposed to be?" The youth asked with curiosity as he unbuckled the chinstrap of his helmet.

The soldier looked up in surprise at the question. He had never been so self-conscious about the clothing he was wearing. The uniform he had on was completely outdated, even by the standards of the shambled Royal Army. He cleared his throat.

"Air-Raid Marshal?" George helped, motioning to the Tin helmet next to him and whistle around his neck.

The man did a double take. "Yes, uh, quite, indeed, Air-Raid Marshal." He confirmed picking up his wide brimmed tin hat and placing it on his head.

George drew a knee up and stared mockingly. "Yea sure?" He asked sarcastically. Clearly he knew something that the man didn't.

When the soldier was in war, airplanes were new technology. They were bi and tri-planes that had very little effect in battle on the ground. It was a futuristic warfare that required a daring spirit and bold heart that he wasn't brave enough to try in his day. He'd roll in the mud rather than touch the sky. He'd leave the flying for when _her_ hand touched his at the dinner table.

"Why? Don't I look like one?" He illustrated his point by blowing his whistle. He prayed it worked, because the god's honest truth was he didn't know what the duce an "Air-Raid Marshal" was.

"Don't tell me, Lord Grantham gave you the job, so you put on an old uniform and you don't know what the hell you're doing?" George queried harshly.

The soldier paused. "That is blunt …" He cleared his throat, and then looked into the youth's eyes as the young man began pulling off his long gauntlets. "But, uh, that's quite the whole blasted story, I'm afraid." He lied with a tug on his ear uneasily.

With a nod, the pilot put the oil stained leather gauntlets together. "Figured …" He seemed rather annoyed. George pointed the fire with his supple gloves. "After a major sortie, all lamps and lights in the sector are doused." He explained with a grunt as he stood. "If the Luftwaffe launched a second wave, for a night raid, every 109 in the escort, or even Nose Gunner on a bomber would rip this whole area a new clearing. From the air, when everything is dark, even the softest glimmer can be seen from up there for miles. It's not advanced calculus here, genius." There was something chastising as the ace began unbuttoning his double breasted mahogany leather coat.

It stung the man a bit in the bite of the youth's hard words. But it was an old and quite familiar bite that brought out a mischievous side of the soldier. It was a back and forth, a give and take, of doing something improperly and smirking at the chastisement. He may not know the youth very well, but he knew the woman ingrained into his very DNA, well enough.

"You know, I did save your life." He bit back at the harshness with the most secret of toothy grin as he looked into the fire, almost believing he was talking to someone else.

"Yeah and now I'm saving yours."

George slipped off his padded leather helmet freeing grown out raven curls, running a hand through them. This surprised the soldier quite a bit. He had always hopped the boy to take after him, thought, and always believed that he would.

"I thought you were blond." The soldier exclaimed staring at the perfect black locks.

Questioning the pilot's hair color seemed to come out of nowhere. The youth turned painfully slow to stare at him blankly.

"It's just … in the newspapers." The soldier quickly covered when he realized how strange it came out. "You … I, just assumed you were blond." He shrugged awkwardly.

"Not since I was a little kid." George replied with a screwed up frown at the odd observation. "Washed out a long time ago." He just shook his head dismissively and looked out at the woods, placing his gloves inside his helmet.

"It's just, you look so much like Cora. I mean Lady Grantham." He recovered quickly.

To this George just smirked as he pulled off his goggles from the top of his padded helmet and looped them around his neck. "My, I could make a fortune if Sybbie and I charged every time we heard that one." The soldier smiled at the retort.

The pilot clearly had no idea just how much he sounded like his mother tonight.

But the smile faded as the man noticed that George reached into his jacket's inner pocket. Flipping open the flap, he pulled a cylinder out of a pack of cigarettes with his teeth. The soldier was slacked jaw for a moment watching the pilot jostle the items in the pack.

"Don't tell me you smoke." There was something between shock and chastisement in his voice.

The youth drew his revolver and opened the cylinder. "Only Krauts and Arabs." He retorted arrogantly, turning to show that the cylinder in between his teeth was in fact a round for the revolver. George had used Cigarette packs, replacing the smokes for rifle cartridge slugs for emergency reloads for times such as these.

The blond stranger watched the pilot dump the chambers in hand and sort out the used rounds. "Arabs?" he asked as George tossed out empty shells. Picking the large bullet out of his teeth, the pilot loaded it in the chamber.

"There are many differences between your common Nazi Thug and an Arab. But the one thing they can agree on is their view on Jews. And as you have pointed out, as most people, I have more than a passing resemblance to my grandmother who is half Jewish. Walking down a back alley in Alexandria is just about as dangerous as a black man wandering next door to a Democratic Party revival in South Georgia. Which is why I vote Republican and carry the pistol and extra rounds at all times." He explained reloading the revolver with rifle bullets.

The man watched him rearm the very familiar pistol he knew just as well. "Well, I really don't see the need for it." He challenged. "As you can tell if you look around, I don't think you're gonna find Klu Klux Klan members or Arabs around here." He comforted.

George turned to the stranger, spinning the cylinder. There was danger in the younger man's eyes. The glare the pilot fit around the man's neck made him feel quite the fool.

"I counted about forty-five German planes today." He snapped the cylinder back into the old Colt revolver. "We shot down two dozen of them, damaged the rest." He explained. "If I'm gonna guess, rough amount, about twenty percent of them survived the crashes. I'd say five percent of them died of their injuries by now. Which all of that adds up to about, maybe, a dozen or more Nazis out here, scared, desperate, and probably fit to be tied. The home guard patrols are gonna be looking for them in the morning, but for tonight, they're gonna be all over the countryside. And I don't know if you read the papers lately, but these Krauts are not the friendliest people in the world." He drew the click of his trigger to test the cylinder.

"I burned that vest, because it's brightly colored and an easy target to aim at in the dark. I also don't want anyone I don't like finding it and following me. And I'm reloading my revolver, because it's gonna be one helluva night and there's a good chance we're gonna see some trouble before it's over." George clicked the hammer forward.

That wasn't what the stranger was expecting to hear. When he came here, to the County of Grantham, many long years ago, he found it a strange and surreal place. It was quiet, peaceful, beautiful, and charmingly quaint in the best ways. After London and Manchester, there was something almost magical about it. A place you came to relax, to take in the grandest country life, and, for him, to fall in love. Strife and war was a world, a whole universe away from this lush paradise. There was something very alarming to return to this fair country to find it one of the most dangerous places in the world tonight.

He watched the young ace spin the pistol on his finger, forward and backward, stopping only to aim at his own shadow on a tree trunk. "You seem to know how to use that very well." It wasn't a compliment.

"I've seen my fair share of danger since I left here." He twirled the pistol right into its holster.

There was a long pause between the two men, as George surveyed the campsite. Finally, he found what he was looking for. The soldier watched the pilot pace over to where he had awoken. There, on the leaf strewn ground was a large leather pack he had his head on top of. The youth dropped to a knee and began examining it.

"So what's the next move from here …" The man was serious now. Obviously they needed to find shelter somewhere if things were as tense as he assumed they were.

Examining the bag, the youth just shrugged. "I don't know about you … but I'm gonna do what I usually do after a bad day." He answered distractedly.

"Which is what?" The man seemed pleasantly content to finally find out something about the youth he had come all this way to be with.

"Tea and a novel …"

"Really?"

"Yep."

"You don't say?"

"You bet …"

George looked up from his fiddling with the pack and saw the man strangely satisfied and content with the answer. It had always been the ritual of the man in times of great stress, heartache, or just a day that didn't go his way, to eat good food, drink a warm, milky, froth in a cup, and get lost in worlds of great adventure and high romance. Worlds where all the princesses had red tinted eyes and Perseus fancied books more than country sports. Off in his remembrances of his own bad days in his youth, he turned back to the pilot who just stared at him in disbelief.

"What?"

"You actually think that's what I do?"

"Don't you?"

The youth looked at the man as if he had just been thoroughly convinced that the world was, in fact, flat. "Screw that!" he said in mock. "I'm gonna go get pissed out of my skull and get laid." He glared and went back to working the straps to the pack's flap.

The honest admission shocked the soldier. It had been awhile since he had last walked around. But he didn't realize he was in such a society that now talked openly about the drunken whoring that usually happened behind closed doors in his age. They were usually parties that he never pursued, not with the mother that had raised him, and the fact was that he was never really invited to them anyway. But he surely didn't expect that behavior from someone like his own …

"Good lord … you can't be serious?"

"After the day I've had? You're really asking me that?" He grunted trying to unclasp the leather flap.

There was an awkward silence between the soldier and the young pilot. "Is, uh, are those things something you do often?" he asked awkwardly.

After pulling hard on the straps, the flap to the pack opened. With a puff noise, a large wad of pearly silk, soft and smooth as sin, appeared. George shook his hand at the ache the brass clasps had left on his fingers watching his parachute spill out onto the forest floor.

George bit his finger in pain and grunted in response to the soldier's question. "Haven't had the time to get drunk lately. And since Sybbie isn't here for the other stuff …"

"Steady on!"

Hearing the outrage and horror in the man's voice, George just chuckled teasingly under his breath. Catching the mischievous look George shot back at the man, wrangling the parachute, the soldier reigned it all in. There was just the slightest red on his face as he gave a light chastising look toward the pilot.

"Has anyone ever told you, you beg to be teased?" the youth asked with an arrogant smirk.

While he'd question where the "Irish Twins of Downton" got their dark sense of humor concerning their inseparable relationship, the man couldn't find a reason to be mad. Since they started talking, he saw so much of his mother in him, so much of Cora in his look. But when he smirked impishly, for the first time he saw something of himself in the inappropriate humor of the young man.

Wadding up the silk in his arm, the young pilot reached into his shin high leather boot of his upright leg and drew out a knife. It was not the standard issue tool for the Royal Army by any stretch of the imagination. The blade was smoky and curved, scrolls of ancient Persian runes were written on the Damascus steel. The handle was inlaid with gold and brass, with a ruby pummel that had a golden engraving of a Persian family crest. This dagger was a work of art and valuable, an heirloom of an ancient and prominent noble blooded family of Tehran and Constantinople. Now it was being used as a common tool to cut the lines off of a parachute.

"Balls, you don't see that everyday …" The man's eyes nearly bulged at the sight of Damascus steel.

George didn't look up. "I do." he replied easily.

To the sarcastic remark, the man glared with a smirk. "Where did you get that?" He asked in extreme interest.

"The knife?" He stopped to examine his curved dagger. "I got it off of Alemdar Albert Pamuk, illegitimate son of Princess Amélie of Monaco and Mr. Kemal Pamuk son of the old Sultan's niece. His old creaky kneed granny put it in his hand. Told him he'd be legitimized by the British Foreign Office and get all of the Pamuk's petroleum fortune, if he avenged his mother's rapist. Sick, sadistic, son of a bitch …" He snarled.

The man turned his head, and, for a moment, he was standing outside of Downton in the cold of a winter's night. The woman he loved more than anything in the world stood next to him, wrapped in his coat from the cold. They had started out looking for Isis, Robert's beloved dog, and they ended the evening by recounting the darkest of secrets of a night of lust and bad decisions that she had made. She had told him everything that she had held onto for so long, everything she was afraid he'd learn. In that fear, in that horrible fantasy in which he would come to hate her for her lapse in judgment, all he could think as she told her story of the late Mr. Pamuk was how much he loved her. How stressful it must have been, how harrowing it all was for her. He couldn't hate her, because he loved her so much. And even now he didn't hate her, could never bring himself to do so … but he couldn't imagine how many years and lifetimes later and the incident still left a black mark on everything their love had built and weathered. The treacherous and horrid late Mr. Pamuk, even now, was still haunting the very legacy of the greatest of loves.

"What ever happened to this bastard Alemdar?" He asked between gritted teeth and a stiff face of anger as the woman of his dreams, near tears, shouted at him how it was **"just lust"** that led her to the foreigner's arms that night.

The youth didn't flinch at the stranger's sudden anger on his behalf. He had the exact same face as the man, looking into the flames. "Grabbed Sybbie when we were in Cairo, threatened to do awful things to her if I didn't meet his challenge. He jumped me at the Alexander "The Great" exhibit at Museum after closing. Cut me to the bone on my right hand. So I put two shots in him." He patted the revolver in his side. "But the Frenchman still had enough fight in him to nick my left lung …" He paused. An old hatred danced with the flickering ember reflections in his eyes as he relived the duel.

"Then what …?" The man asked. His eyes squeezed shut at the imagery he wished he couldn't imagine of George fighting in such desperate and brutal circumstances. And yet it was "Just Lust" that caused all of this.

The pilot blinked and went back to cutting the cables of the parachute. "Then … I took that old hag's knife and I cut her last heir's heart out." His bitterness was reflected in the snapping noise the line made when he cut it off the silk. "And so fell the House of Pamuk." He snorted with hate giving one last look at the ancestral heirloom of his enemies. "Nothing left but a letter opener and a dusty old princess counting her gold bars." He shook his head.

Watching the Ace work, the man considered for a moment. Was it hyperbole or had he really, in his anger over being hunted most of his life and the taking of Sybbie, actually go through with it? Had the boy actually cut out the man's heart? Had a life as hard as he had lived, had it made him as savage as all that? He didn't know just what to believe of this youth with a million stories and a thousand heart breaks. But he knew that whatever he was, he was his, for better or worse.

"What are you doing?" He asked.

The youth gave him a very familiar side eye of annoyance. Apparently whoever his new companion was, he sure was full of questions. "There's a dress shop in the village. Or at least there used to be when I lived here. My mom and aunts used to have their frocks made there, or, well, shipped there at any rate. Silk is hard to come by these days and tonight is their lucky night." He began working on the main cable that attached the silk to the leather pack.

"I remember …"

There was the fondest smile on the man's face at a proud and smug girl that swept into the drawing room. Her dark blue eyes alight as she showed off the harem pants of her ocean blue frock. There was shock, revulsion, envy, and pride in the way the occupants had reacted. But most of all, the man remembered one reaction in particular. It was the chauffer in the window. He did not saying anything, not robbing the man of the starry eyed look, and the great pain of the greatest of love that overcame him as he watched the beautiful angel. Later, they'd ask him if he had known of the romance between the Lady and the Chauffer. And while he honestly could say he didn't know, quietly, he'd find, remembering that day, that he wasn't surprised by it at all.

"So you're just gonna give it to them?" He asked changing the subject.

"Hell no! I'm gonna sell it." the pilot gave him a double take at the suggestion like it had been the ramblings of a mad man. He began stuffing the parachute back inside the pack.

"Isn't that a bit un-gallant, undignified, of you to do? Taking advantage?" He asked unapproving.

"What, you mean, me, selling off military equipment to fund my Hedonistic celebration of surviving?" He looked up at the man. "Nah …" He went back to packing in the silk. "I mean I'm gonna sell it to them at cost. And if that ginger girl from Thirsk with the loose morals still works there, I might even throw in a discount." He huffed wistfully shoving down the last of the parachute.

"Crickey …"

Once more the soldier felt the culture shock of the honesty and the less than moralistic conduct and compass that guided the youth looking to indulge the basest needs. He understood it, and he dare say that once he found the right woman in his wife, the two of them could barely go a night sometimes an afternoon without making love. But he was married, and he only had the upmost respect for the woman he loved. As a man with a title in his future, with position given by law, he had expected something more controlled and honorable than the tough talking, hard drinking, air racing, gun fighting, and adventuring youth in front of him.

But while the man seemed disappointed, George was annoyed as he walked over and picked up his helmet and gloves. "Look here, _Pops_." He thrust the items at the man as an accusatory finger. It was almost Freudian that he gave the man the nickname for his outdated uniform and blushing, gentlemanly reactive behavior toward his liberal lifestyle. Never knowing the truth, or how Freudian it was about to get.

"I just went through the third largest air battle anyone has ever seen. I alone, just me, killed over a dozen men today. My uncle, a man I liked quite a bit, along with all of my friends, are dead. And all of that happened in one _**fucking**_ afternoon! You wanna know where my head's at? I'll tell you where it's at, asshole! At this very moment, very moment, I'm in such a dark place that not only would I drink my family wine cellar dry, but I'd literally screw my own mother! A woman I don't even know or like, but I'd do her on that stump right over there! And a whole lot worst just to make me forget that this goddamn day ever happened! So you better bet your uptight ass that I'm gonna get shit faced and I'm gonna get lost in something tight, warm, moist, and preferably pretty! That's where I'm at tonight! That's who I am! "

George put a period on his rant, by shoving his helmet into the parachute pack. Then, with a discourteous bump to the shocked man's shoulder, he stuffed his gauntlets in his coat pocket. The Soldier watched him hike away from the fire and into the starlight beams that broke the canopies of the dark forest. George paused and put his hand on his forehead, the rant, the anger, and the frustration seemed to momentarily take the wind out of him.

The stranger felt a bit guilty. He knew the feelings that the youth had. In his day he had seen the dead pile up like a wall of corpses in "No Man's Land" that separated the opposing battle lines. The darkness of seeing those things, those horrors, and the toll they took. Each man, each soldier, had their own way of coping with the terrible sights and feelings of war. It was possible that he was just expecting too much of George, that the boy, the man, he always dreamed he would be, was an unfair standard to hold him too in a life that was so completely off model as it was. But while he didn't agree with his drunken and wenching approach to these dark hours, he'd forgive the pilot for it, especially when he had no one else to turn too.

"My dear chap …" he turned.

The youth was already moving toward the road. "You coming, Pops?" He called. "Or would you like to stick around for the next Nazi Pilot that swings by so you can judge his life choices too? Cause, if you think I'm bad, wait till you hear what an SS goon does on his days off. That'll put grey in your damn hair real fast." He called in stinging mockery as he continued into the dark.

It was an odd feeling of sentiment and familiarity that drew George to the stranger even in anger. It wasn't just any kind of man who would save another's life at the great cost of his own, then sit with him till he knew he was okay. When he closed his eyes he could almost see the golden hue of Downton's lobby, and the dapper man and the beautiful woman dancing. George wasn't stupid. He knew something was going on tonight. Something strange had been going on all day. The nurse, the train with his family aboard, and now the dapper man in an old officer's uniform. Maybe he had just hit his head too hard, maybe he was seeing things, but he'd never know till he did.

Slinging the pack over a shoulder, George continued on. The soldier jogged up next to him. He turned and wanted to say something. But his words died in his throat. He knew the value of silence and right now maybe it was what they needed, especially if this was to be as long and dangerous of a night as George warned it would be. But even as they began their trek to the village of Downton, there was one thing that bothered Matthew Crawley.

"I do hope you were joking about the business with your mother."

George gave a half breath of amusement now that his words actually caught up with him. He came to realize that maybe he had gone a bit overboard on the rant, especially where it concerned ravishing Lady Mary. But he'd never let the uptight soldier see him concede anything as going too far. There was the very blackest of humor in his tired voice as they began hiking side by side … on the road home.

"Not if she's still got the ass I remember."

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _Born in the U.S.A" – Bruce Springsteen_

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _I got outta the habit of doing Author's notes, because, people tend to review the Notes rather than the story. But I think there might be a bit of confusion if I don't clarify a few things._

 _One, I screwed up George's age, because I didn't pay attention to "One Year Later" during the Season 3 Christmas Special till a recent rewatch but I was already deep into this story. So George and Sybbie are "Irish Twins" in this slight AU. Sybbie was born in early 1920 and George around Christmas of 1920 in this story._

 _Two, I'm not gonna beat around the bush. Inappropriate humor is kinda my thing, joking about incest especially kinda comes out in my stories about close knit families. But no, Mary is in no danger of being thoroughly ravished by George. Kid's just acknowledging how fucked up he is right now. But in my defense, in the show, Lord Grantham and Cora have made quite a few inappropriate cracks acknowledging Mary being Sexy, this is canon. (Season 6 Episode 6!)_

 _Finally, the title of the chapter. I know that George wasn't born in the USA. But the song informs about 90% of the character as a teenager and young adult. If you listen to it, you'll understand why. And to a certain extent, Georges struggles and adventures in Depression America informed him as a person. So in a way he was sort of born in the USA in terms of this Story Universe._

 _Probably the only Author's Notes you're gonna get outta me. So while I'm here, I'd like to thank the entire Downton fandom for the warm welcome. This is by far the nicest reception I've ever gotten from a new fandom ever. And while this is probably the chapter in which I lose everyone because of the cussing, angst, and well … incest jokes. I still would like to thank you for being nicest and classiest fandom I've ever encountered._

 _Would love reviews from reader's like you. Hear what you have to say. (About the story please, not the notes.) Love to break even with Chapter 8 here as we enter the final act of the story._


	9. It's a Long Road - Part I

**It's a Long Road:**

 _Part I_

A frigid wind came rushing from the west, sweeping through twisted branches and the chattering bloom of the late summer foliage. The whispers of an early autumn freeze was but a rumor In the mid-hours of evening's chill, the darkened sky humming like the taught cord of a violin who had played the sympathy of passion and misfortune. The ghost of the days killing and heavenly battle still echoed across the English countryside. Covering the smoky ruins and twisted metal was a misty froth that slowly covered the destruction like the lapping waves of the ocean. The stars were unveiled and twinkling in the dark, milky, night sky. There seemed to be billions of them clustered together and in full effect, sparkling like thousands of tiny faces on a cut diamond. It was a time and place in which constellations could be charted and loves could be won on such a night as this.

There was something in the tendrils of the dark that stirred restlessly by war and suffering. Years from now, people would look back at this one night, those who lived through it, and could say with absolute certainty that there was something supernatural in the very chilled air breathed through the green countryside. No one would believe them, and you could never quite convince the person hiding in the bomb shelter, like any good and sane person would've. But for those that stayed out in the open, who took their chances in the night. They'd all say that there was something special. Tomorrow, when they woke up and found that the world had returned to normal after so many months of terror and nightmares, they'd all say "Of course it's over, are you daft, look what was going on outside." They'd be waved off, or just chalk it up to the great wisdom and instinct of advanced years of experience. Like the old farmer who could feel the summer storm coming in his bones.

But for now, there was no denying that it had been a strange day and it was going to be an even wilder night before dawn was shown on a new age and day in the oldest of kingdoms.

But for all that, Matthew Crawley was never sure exactly who the contradictory 'Devil-may-care' attitude that the young man shown was inherited from. But to say that they had been walking for a good twenty minutes and after an earful of the dangers that everyone on Lord Grantham's lands faced tonight, George Crawley had spent half that time singing on the road back to Downton. Matthew might have been amused by his son, if he hadn't flinched for the youth at every crunch of forest noise and flicker of dancing shadows that the starlight cast from low hanging branches. But the Racer didn't seem to be afraid of anything as he hiked along the empty country road, his singing voice echoing through the atmospheric night air. There was an unforgiving arrogance of youth to the pilot, with the back of his leather jacket collar popped up, that had to be admired. George Crawley wasn't about to do the reasonably smart thing and stick to the wooded cover. The young man had never been one to sneak around, especially on his home turf.

So if a shot-down Nazi Pilot was 'man enough' to try and fight George Crawley, by god, they'd know where to find him.

For the last few minutes the soldier pondered if this was a Mary Josephine Crawley or a Martha Levinson thing. But then he knew, by intuition, that it was both, and all with a great weariness. With a shake of his head, he continued his tireless pace behind the pilot who was languid and unconcerned in his progress back toward civilization.

Matthew knew the song that George was singing, though he was not very familiar with it. "The Red River Valley" was a song that you didn't hear much in Manchester or Downton. It was an American folk song, not British. His curiosity was peaked even more by the fact that the younger man actually sang the chorus in Spanish. It wasn't uncommon for a governess or teacher to teach a second and or third language to his or her students. Lady Grantham spoke both French and Italian, an American Princess's education that was meant to win her a titled husband, and just so. But the Spanish that George was singing wasn't the Iberian lisp that he had heard some high born aristocrats speak to show off after holidays. He dare say that it wasn't even Mexican Spanish. It was some dialect that was local to the towns and cattle ranches in Southern Texas. Matthew had only known that because of Cora and his interest in the cattle markets. Tom and many of the tenants were interested in sheep and pigs, but Matthew and Cora found cattle to be more reliable, and Robert had always had a fondness for the American Wild West, in concept and romanticism. He had met with a Texas Rancher, a transplanted Englishman, who settled up with a ranch during the cattle boom. The Rancher's foreman and head cowboy spoke the same rustic Spanish that George did. It was another purely American attribute that someone had taught the youth. The way he talked, the way he carried himself, and even the way he sounded. Matthew was afraid there wasn't even a fraction of an Englishman in his boy.

The tall, dark, and heartbreakingly handsome young man was as American as if he had been raised on the plains, herding cattle, or picking cotton. He'd admit that it troubled the soldier more than a little. There was a national pride in being English, tiresome, sometimes even a bit trying, but it was his home and it should be his child's home. Or so he had thought. But George Crawley was about as far right to American as it got, he'd dare say that even Lady Grantham after fifty years in Britain was more English than her own grandson. It was hard to accept the reason why George was the way he was, fore he knew all too well of the why. He knew what his reason was for being here, and he had hoped that it was to fix what had been broken between the two people he loved the most, but tragically, he knew that it wasn't.

"You could sing a little louder?" Matthew flinched at the shuffle of shrubs in the tree line.

George didn't even turn to address the annoyed sarcasm for the benefit of his safety. "Here's a little tip for you, Pops." The man sighed warming his hands in his jacket pockets. "If you treat everywhere you go as being in Indian Country, than you're always prepared for trouble. But if you jump at every shadow and hide from every rustle of the branches then you'll never get where you're going. If a Kraut jumps out from behind a tree, I'll handle him … but until he does decide to show himself, lighten up." The soldier knew the familiar glare that was on his son's face.

It was increasingly obvious that this wasn't George's first time traveling by starlight on a country road. Nor was he fazed by the danger of the possibility of being stalked in the dark by some of the evilest and vilest of men that the world, if not heaven and hell, had conjured and placed on the chess board of destiny. If it was arrogance or experience, the pilot didn't seem all that bothered by the prospect of the danger of the road back to the very place he would soon own.

Had the older soldier not known anything about this young man, he might have found his candor and confidence, infectious and drawing. It was what he had loved about Lady Mary from the first moment he had laid eyes upon the red eyed beauty. But arrogance at the dinner table and in the ballroom was different than the bold, youthful, idealism of immortality and luck in war. It also didn't help that Matthew was this young man's father, a father who loved his child so very much. He hadn't had twenty years with the boy, had fights, slamming doors, and telling offs. He hadn't come to terms with years of knowing George and having to let go of him to find his own path. Matthew had only spent a better part of three minutes with him in his entire life. To the soldier, the dashing and daring, swashbuckling, racing pilot was still the tiniest little chap in the whole world, who cooed in his beautiful mother's arms in a hospital in Ripon. It was that mindset that kept him on edge and frustrated with that same little chap's thoughtlessness for his own safety.

"I sense that this is not your first time being out here, looking danger in the face, and singing to it in Spanish." He grumbled under a breath as he fast-walked to take a place next to George.

"Oh yeah … back in '32 I walked, rode the rails, and traveled on the back of trucks from The Upper East Side in Manhattan to the French Quarter down in New Orleans. That was a helluva a trip. I was hunted from The Mansion Graveyard down on Fifth Avenue all the way to the rail line in Harper's Ferry. And Hell those were Pinkerton too." The young man hitched up his parachute pack. "So, this is nothing that doesn't come unnatural, no." He frowned. "Though, I didn't sing Spanish …" He snorted at the man with a mocking eyebrow raise. "At the time anyway." He smirked confidently with a shrug.

There was some recognition in the name. He knew of the Pinkerton Detective Agency from his reading of the New York Times off and on, when Lady Grantham would lend it to him. They were a security and private police force, many industrial companies and Political Bosses in the major cities in Eastern America had used their services to put down worker strikes, protests, and strong arm political opponents. They were always characterized as vicious and violent thugs that were no better than racketeering enforcers in the poor immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island. They were highly dangerous men and it was just one more worrying thing about this youth's past that made his father even more on edge than ever before.

Especially in 1932, when these, violent, urban mercenaries were chasing a twelve year old child from the East Coast to the Mason-Dixon Line … Matthew's child.

"Why were these "Pinkerton's" after you?" he tried to sound even keeled, but he couldn't hide the sudden fear in his voice for a young adolescent he never knew.

To the question the pilot gave his companion a double take. It seemed quite over his head when he never considered that someone might have asked him that. He looked into the crystalline eyes of Matthew and in a moment of their concern observations the pilot felt a deep darkness fall over him. He cast his gaze away from a man who looked as if he thought the world of him. George's jaw tightened and there was something deeply guilty on his face as he walked.

"They had their reasons, I suppose." He shifted his jaw as he spoke with a gravelly darkness in his American accented voice.

The hairs on the back of his neck visibly stood up and a rush of old aggression and violence charged through him as if he was still _there_. The road was dark, but then so had been the street when he climbed up the row house's gutter drain. Eight years later, his finger twitched where a trigger to his revolver should be. The sight in front of him from a crystal window of a Knickerbocker palace, till this day, disgusted and enraged him. A good man died today in ignorance of what had been happening, what had been going on behind closed doors to keep food on his families table, fine clothes on his small children's backs, and to continue to have his financial job when all the other banks were shuttering. In the end, George said all that had to be said about the reasons for why the oldest families of New York Society sent their thugs after him …

They had their reasons … and so did George.

Matthew saw the guilty and angry reminders of one awful night eight years ago. He didn't know what it was that tormented the youth, but he knew that it was something that George had done. He had seen something so awful, so horrible, and the twelve year old's reaction to it had been just as worse. After all these years he was still haunted by it, haunted not by the action he took to put a stop to it, but by the fact that the one man who should've known about what had been going on, was dead. It was a truth that one person should've been told about, but now would never hear.

Sensing the loaded and complicated feelings of the reasoning that both sides had for the conflict, Matthew veered away from it. He wished to know more about the incident, to know what had happened. It was clear that George needed to talk to someone about what he had seen and what he had done. But the boy had promised himself that he'd never breathe a word to anyone about it, not even the beautiful damsel who had been the victim. He suffered in silence to protect her and her children from scandal and horrible trudging up of the shameful dubious consent to the desires of _**devious**_ perversity of opportunists who took advantage of her desperate times.

Matthew Crawley knew nobility when he saw it. And as a fellow _'defender of the downtrodden'_ a larger part of him was proud of his boy, no matter what he had done to suffer through this dark reprieve. He'd not judge him, no matter what the crime was he had committed to protect someone he cared for. A normally principled man, Matthew found that when it came to George, he suddenly had none. He wasn't sure what that made him, but he knew that it just wasn't in him to ever hate Mary's child, his child … their baby.

"How did you end up in America?" He asked trying to change the subject.

Whatever dark things had been plaguing George in this hour of a very long life already, it seemed to fade away. He was silent for a long moment. Matthew almost couldn't fight the hand he could've placed on his dearest chap's narrow shoulder. But somehow he did so, helped by the pilot rubbing his handsome face tiredly. It was as if he was scrubbing away the Mark of Cain that had been laid upon him. He didn't seem cured, but he was fresh enough from his brooding memories to find a lighter tone that he used as a shield.

"A crooked card game." He roughly smirked in revelry.

There was a deep frown from the Englishman next to him. "How did you really get there from here?" he asked seriously.

The smirk turned to a grin at the disbelieving tone that his companion had. "I'm telling you, it was a not so lucky hand of poker." The dark cloud that had fallen on him seemed to vanish in his retort, smiling in self-pleasing glory of the memories.

George Crawley's journey to the New World didn't actually begin with a card game. It started with a movie. "Hell's Angels" a feature produced and directed by the patron saint of all adventurers and aviators, Mr. Howard Hughes. He had been a personal hero of both George and Sybbie, a worrisome prospect to Tom Branson for years afterward, who might go to his grave learning that they had turned his and Lady Mary's automobile shop into an aero-aviation company. But for now the biggest problem that the little children had was that they wanted so very much to go to London to see the movie about fighter aviators in the Great War. Lady Grantham, who had been following the four year odyssey of the films undertaking in the newspapers, thought it unsuitable for the children. Meanwhile, at Grantham House, Isobel was quite unsure what to do about the whole situation. The former Mrs. Merton had been George's guardian for years now and she didn't see any harm in a movie, but she didn't want to step on Cora's toes in this regard. The truth was that the woman was becoming quite sick, though hid it well. Quietly, George's welfare had been becoming more and more Lady Grantham's responsibility. Seeing the opportunity, Cora, with Tom's help, who thought that a 'Matronly' voice was needed in the subject, had put the question to Lady Mary. With Isobel's ailing health, Cora saw the question of the movie, as an opportunity to reintroduce Mary into George's life.

Before then, George had almost no interaction with his mother. The children were still too young to be at the formal dinner table, when invitations went to Crawley house. And Mary seemed to have scheduled her rounds for when George was to come to Downton. More troubling was that it was all fine with George. The boy, over the years, had stopped vainly trying to win back his mother's affections and as of late had grown to have an increasing bitterness for Lady Mary with each passing week. In the extremely rare times they had come face to face at a just as rare tea time that George showed up for, it was very uncomfortable for those around them and an icy affair for mother and child at best. It was a short and contentious exchange that began with a very haughty and forced interaction from Lady Mary as she asked her son showily how his day was. The hurt and angriest little chap in the village of Downton would never look up from his chess game with his Grandfather, but quietly asked back "What do you care?" under his breath darkly as he moved a piece. In the awkward and uncomfortable silence Mary would take the venom and anger with an excuse to say her usual "My …" and open the paper to read the gossip column and ignore George. There would be no reconciliation from two bitter parties. George was fine being stuck to his Aunt Edith or his Granny in those rare teas. Many guests over the years had become increasingly confused that Lady Grantham was the boy's mother, due to the spitting likeness in appearance, clearly mutual unconditional love, and her increasing involvement in his day to day life. Meanwhile, Lady Mary, his actual mother, seemed nothing more than a distant aunt.

Any happily accompanied trips, enduring stories of adventure, or shows of great affection between George and his very beloved Aunt Edith was often sharply punished at dinner by Mary. She was not interested in Edith "Showing off" or tales of how the up jumped Marchioness couldn't help "Meddling" with _things_ that belonged to Mary. It was a row that never got started, as each time Edith was about to answer in kind, Robert warned both women that he would not have them fighting over the children at the table.

Tom however knew that it was a bad idea and so did everyone else when they learned of the Countess's scheme. But he still had faith that the woman he loved, was still inside that beautiful icy veneer he spent most days with. But they had all underestimated the level of anger, hurt, and resentment between George and Mary. It would soon be shown in the events that led to George's departure to the new world.

They had posed the question to Lady Mary at tea time. Sybbie had once again been lobbying to the family for her and George to go to the movies in London. She included Marigold, though everyone knew that Marigold had no interest in the movie, beyond wanting to see it because George and Sybbie wanted to see it. And they never did anything without inviting Marigold first. It was a sure fire bet, for George and Sybbie, if it was in the hands of their 'Mama'. Mary rarely cared enough for anything this small, and if it was going to cause her bother, than she'd sooner agree to a plea, then deal with the fallout of her rejection.

But it was that in these last few weeks, Mary's Beau of the month, had become quite trying on her patience and temper. He had been showering her with gifts and posh dinners. But he had been expecting something in return from his beautiful prize. Since then, the phone had been ringing off the hook when she fled London back to Downton. She sought refuge, knowing that her Papa would most likely shoot the man who stepped into his foyer demanding what he was of his daughter. But since the termination of her relationship with her millionaire suitor, she had been in a cold and quite nasty mood. From Footman to Lord Grantham himself, no one had been spared the sharp rebuke and low blows of Lady Mary's wit that week. Tom had forgiven her, knowing of her loneness and sorrow of the broken realization that there was no other man of honor who wanted a twice widowed Great Lady. There was no other Matthew Crawley in this world to warm her bed and hold her through the long sorrowful nights. She was a meal ticket and wonderful lay to those who pursued her like a collectible doll to be placed on a shelf. And in her rage of being utterly alone and bargained for by society climbers, she had took it out on the ones who had still loved her no matter what.

And it was why when she heard that George wanted to go, she said he could.

But it was her quid-pro-quo that had erased any good will and patience that her loving family had for her hard time. George and Sybbie could go see the movie, _if_ , they could find a way to buy the tickets themselves, without barrowing money. Even Cora, who had been against letting 'the babies' see the movie in the first place, was outraged by Mary's stipulations. But it was her law as their 'mama'. Since that faithful tea, the children had their grandparents, Lady Edith, and all of downstairs as their allies, working on their behalf to find a way to break Mary's 'entail' of the movie viewing. Like many years before, it seemed to be unbreakable. But they found their savior in the form of Martha and Harold Levinson.

They had come on a visit to Downton to pay their respects to the recently deceased Dowager. Though there was some mutterings from Lord and Lady Grantham's bedroom at night that it was, in truth, to dance on Lady Violet's crypt. George's presence had been requested to welcome his great-grandmother, and there she had overheard of the task of Hercules that had been laid at the boy's feet for the first time. George had been furious when Sybbie had told him what was required to see their much vaunted war film. Harold, who had been at the premiere in Los Angeles, had offered to tell his Grand-Niece and Nephew about it, but had found early going that he had spent most of the film asleep in an actress's cleavage.

Mrs. Levinson had been oddly quiet when watching young George. There was a spark in her eye as she saw the boy for the first time. It had been there when they put Cora in her arms and she saw her little blue eyes. Then, she had known that her little girl would be something amazing, an American Princess to be loved and admired for the rest of her life. That was what her baby would be. And she knew by looking at George Crawley, Heir to the Earl of Grantham, born of a great and impossible love, that there was something there behind those curls and blue eyes. And there had only been one way to know for sure.

Suddenly Martha announced that they'd have a poker game that night after the dinner party.

Robert had protested, saying that it was not a game suitable for ladies. But Martha blew her son-in-law off, looking Edith over and then examining the tight silk that clung and was meant to show off Mary's perfectly shaped rear. Then she conceded that it was not a game suitable for ladies, but between the 'Beaked Nosed Cream Baby' and the 'Vampire Harlot' they should all be fine. When she left the insulted library Robert pressed the issue with Cora, but his wife told him to let her mother have it. Since the moment Cora had been locked into a back straightening rod at age seven, she knew there was no point fighting Martha Levinson.

Immediately, a glimmer twinkled in George Crawley's eye. As the family went up to start their lazy day of entertaining, George grabbed Marigold and beckoned Sybbie to follow. With no nannies present, they were given free reign, and thus they scrambled downstairs where George had been an honorary member. As Anna and John Bates were walking down the steps talking of their children, carrying Robert and Mary's clothing to be mended, they came across a little huddle of small children in the Servant's Hall. The Lady's Maid looked up to her husband mischievously charmed at the hushed little voices making their plans. Later Mr. Bates said, jokingly, that someone should warn the Prime Minster and his Majesty the King that there was a pair of Jacobite revolutionaries and their 'Sally' plotting in the Downton kitchens.

The day seemed to go slowly upstairs. Conversations were about the economic boom, the car business going smoothly, and Lady Mary's growing popularity in public due to her modeling in advertisements for Tom, and now her, automobile business. Edith looked like she might wanted to have hung herself as they all droned on about talks of fashion magazines sending interested letter about Lady Mary modeling for them. But in the Servant's Hall, what started out as some covert inquiries asked by the children to be carried out by the Butler, Thomas Barrow, had now taken a life of its own. Soon, all of Downstairs was wrapped up in Master George's plan. They were collecting donations, Thomas was continuing to teach George how to play a certain, some might even say 'disreputable' style of cards, and even Anna and Bates volunteered to collect intel on tonight's activity. No one was sure what the "Buy In" for Mrs. Levinson's poker game would be, but Mrs. Hughes had given them more than enough to cover it. When asked by Mr. Carson if she had given away a week's wage to this "outrageous" scheme, Mrs. Hughes replied that she'd give a month's wage to see that "Uppity Minx" get taken down a peg or two by someone who deserved to do the smacking.

Mr. Carson would've put a stop to the whole thing, if it wasn't for the fact that everything was under the command of Master George. Still perturbed at what would later be fondly remembered as "The Nursery Rebellion", he went to his Lordship and her Ladyship with the news of the machinations coming from the third generation of Grantham. Expecting that Master George be drawn and quartered before being marched before his grandparents, Mr. Carson was surprised by the shared private grins of Robert and Cora. Robert asked how much money George and Sybbie had collected, and then announced that the buy in would be a quarter of that, "Just to be sure". Mr. Carson waited for some sort of rebuke from such impendent behavior, but instead Lady Grantham went back to her Needle point with a grateful "Thank you, Carson." When they thought he was gone they both shared a significant look and continued chuckle at the children they had come to love so fiercely.

In any other week, of any other year, there would be a kindly but stern lecture of respecting one's mother. But this week, after the terror that Lady Mary, who had forgotten that she was not the Grecian Goddess Aphrodite, had inflicted on the household. Lord and Lady Grantham had decided that the only person who would put a stop to the children would be the woman who set loose the 'Dogs of War' in the first place. If their eldest child wished to remain passively uninterested in the children, then the self-inflicted pain would only continue. Thus they remained quietly biased toward the Rebels.

When the dressing gong had been rung, Mary spent half of her time dressing and fixing her hair, speaking to Anna of a better brand of blusher, and if she might try some looser cuts. The other half was the disapproval of Edith's parenting, and accusations of her turning George against her. Lady Mary had been adamant that tonight, at the dinner party, she wanted to look her cover girl best, determined to squash Edith like a bug with her sheer beauty, despite Anna telling her that Lady Edith didn't really have anything to do with anything. By the time they were ready to go down, Mary Crawley looked as if she was about to attend the party with his Majesty the King himself at a state dinner. Glistening, shining, and shimmering like a precious jewel, she strode out of her room in sleek, satiny, and sequence. In her black mermaid dress and diamond choker, earrings, and bracelet, she was perfection. Lady Mary was every inch the perfectly beautiful model that her public and their dinner guests expected her to be.

Letting the dinner party wait for her big entrance, she swept into the library casually. She had stopped hearts, caught breaths, and made everyone fall in love with her. She had relished the looks of outrage and hatred for her from all the wives in the room whose husbands had been drawn to her like moths to the white hot flame. Appropriate, not appropriate, shameful, or envious, Mary didn't care who had become infatuated with her. She'd have all of them eating out of her hand. If all that she was now was some great prize to be won and bedded, than she'd be such a prize that they all would chase but know, in their very souls, they could never catch. She was Downton's brightest, unattainable, star, to be worshiped by all …

Except for one.

Lady Mary swept past the shower of lust, adoration, and envy of the crowd. But she was stopped abruptly by the eight year old boy who was looking for a book on the Crusades. He hadn't looked up as he scribbled his name on the borrowing ledger. Looking to take his book downstairs to continue his reading, while everyone else went to dinner, George had ran into the smooth pelvis of this shimmering goddess. The boy stared blankly at the expecting look on Mary, and the rest of the crowded library that watched. He simply quirked an eyebrow at her attire, then, with a grunt, he slipped the heavy volume of Richard the Third's Campaign to Acre under arm. He didn't say a word to his stunningly beautiful Mama. He just shook his head and walked to the door as if there was nothing special about her appearance. Mary's delicately pristine jaw clenched tightly as she faced the night reflected in the window. But before George left, after nudging his Uncle Harold whose eyes had wandered … downward, he stopped and addressed the room.

"Cover those necks, boys. It's still eight hours to sun up."

There was a rip roar of chuckled laughter as George exited the room. They had found the eight year old's wit and candor to be charming and bold. The boy's biggest fans were the bitter wives whose husbands were so keenly distracted by their hostess's enchantingly seductive daughter. Being compared to a vampire one last time, the look that was plastered on Lady Mary's face when she turned around to the laughter at her expense was near cracking of her emotionless façade. Watching her was Lady Mabel Lane Gillingham, forever Mary Crawley's rival, who had longed to be the one to leave Mary with that same look of reproach. Later at dinner she asked after Lady Grantham for her grandson's prospects … Tony and her young daughter would be needing a suitable husband in the future after her presentation to court.

And anyone who could put Lady Mary in her place was good enough for their girl.

By the end of dinner, Mary was right were George and Sybbie wanted their Mama. Bitter, vengeful, and flickered like a sword to everyone. Lady Mary had a lot to prove, and was nearly at the end of her rope after the public shaming by her own son, in her prime, no less. It could be said that there was no one more dangerous than our own creations. And Mary Crawley had soon found out that there was only one who could shake her so terribly, and it was her own son.

Lady Mary was in deep as the night stretched on. She had won hands that were gladly lost by suitors that had no care that their spiteful wives were sitting right next to them. She had nearly gotten her confidence back as they dealed the last game of the night, when suddenly, with a loud thump, a sack of toys was tossed in a spot that Lord Grantham had just vacated. A new player had swaggered to the table.

That was George Crawley.

With the permission of Lord Grantham and Mrs. Levinson, the patrons, the boy was allowed to buy in. Martha was smirking privately, afraid that her Great-Grandson had wasted the opportunity she had afforded him to show her what he was made of. Mary didn't protest, much to the surprise of everyone. As Harold dealt, she seemed absolutely invigorated. The boy, who she hadn't traded a word with for months, had given her a social black eye at her most glamorous moment. She knew that it was wrong, but it didn't matter, she wanted to see his crestfallen face when she won all of his prized possessions. She knew that she'd have Mama give them back to him in the morning with a smug note she was still working on in her mind, but it was time that she established that she wasn't some Susan Flincher that he could have snide words with.

Mary had taunted George with a snobbish tone about the hours of dishes he'd have to wash to pay back the money that poor Mrs. Hughes was about to lose out. She knew intuitively that all of the boy's money had come from downstairs backers. George's reply was that he didn't mind washing a few dishes. He had always washed his after meals at Crawley House, dish cleaning soap made your hands soft, which is why he didn't need to wear gloves like she did. As Mary's jaw had tightened with an audible tick, Lord Gillingham and all the rest of the players immediately folded. They, like everyone else in the drawing room, wanted to see how this one was going to play out.

Tom Branson shot George a warning look about his tone, which the boy relented, staring at his cards with a tightened cheek. There was weariness to the Irishman as he turned to his best friend to see that she looked frigidly sharp, like if he flicked her, she would shatter into a million pieces and free the savage trapped within. In a showdown that had been building for years, being in the crossfire of Lady Mary and George Crawley was the last place Tom wanted to be.

Everyone in London Society, in clubs and teas, would later remark of the legendary moment in which it was time to 'call', as if they had been there. Many, many, years later, the hand, the game, the very scene would be immortalized in a documentary about American Heiresses in Brittan. It would be a narration underscored to an upright piano version of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in recall of what happened next.

Having exchanged cards with the dealer, two cool glares met across the table. George studied his mother closely, while Mary simply made flirty winks at on lookers and light conversation with guests. In that time, there were a few who saw what George was doing. For the sake of the sudden love and lust they had for his mother, they might have alerted her. In an experienced table, it might have been a bit obvious about the hustle, but to beginners and casual players it seemed to go right past the beautiful Lady. Many suitors had attempted to warn her, but for the pinch of a shoulder and the sharpest of looks that a wife could give a husband. The married women of the room might have forgiven a heady rush of lust for the daughter of the Count and Countess, but the glare on their made-up faces was as if they had put their gloved hands between their husband's legs and squeezed. Thus it was never revealed or spoken of as to what or how exactly George Crawley had hustled his mama, but to say that it was condoned whole heartedly by his teacher Thomas Barrow and the Lady guests whose wedding bands were tight around their husband's … fingers.

Mary's dismissal of George came to an end, when the boy dropped his sack of toys and books in the middle of the table; along with pushing forward all of Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Mosley, and Mr. Barrow's money in the form of chips. In just one hand, George was all in.

Mary broke off her flirtatious conversation at the sound and there was surprise in her red tinted eyes as there was on everyone else's. "My, aren't we daring tonight." She had remarked with showy condescension. But George didn't take his eyes off his mother, coldly focused. He only responded with "Call …" There was something deeply personal in the flippantness of his voice. The woman caught it. There was, so suddenly, a rush of intrigue and extreme interest for the high born guests. But for the Crawley family, there was nothing but a deep discomfort. They knew that Mary had been pushing George for years, and now George had picked a very public and very inappropriate forum to push back hard. He had ambushed his mother, and now the appearance of how this hand ended, would very well affect how Lady Mary was perceived. And they all knew that it was in these situations, which much like her father, she did not thrive. In which temperament got in the way of better nature.

Mary had the coldest of smirks on her pale face as she pushed forward all of her chips. She was adjusting her silky gloves, when Lady Edith announced that it wasn't enough. She had matched George for money. But she hadn't matched the price of the toy planes and books. With flicker of deep seated anger, Mary had told Edith to hush, but it was met with condemnation from others. Lady Edith was a Marchioness, and it was something that a daughter of a Countess just didn't do socially, sister or not. Pressured to match the toys and books values, Mary irritably removed her diamond choker and placed it on the table on top of the stack. Immediately she looked to George with a lifted eyebrow of challenge. Determinedly George removed his brown, double breasted, jacket of suede. Mary smirked and lifted her gloved hand, pushing her slender fingers up, informing him that the jacket wasn't even worth the sliver buckle on the choker. He'd needed much more to match the bet. Scolded, and brooding, Lady Edith saw her chance for revenge, and stepped in. "Here, darling …" Mary looked incensed, when her little sister strode to the table and placed her diamond set, pearl necklace in her nephew's hand. Her golden eyes met her sister's as she leant forward and gave the boy a loving kiss on the cheek, as a companion might on a gaming car on an Orient Express. George exuberantly placed the necklace over his mother's choker. He then shot his indignant mother the mocking exaggeration of the same challenging eyebrow quirk.

Lady Grantham seeing the escalating tension, turned to her husband, who had been lost in the drama of it all till that point, and tugged on his ear lobe lightly. Catching his love's unspoken word, he cleared his throat and announced that the betting was more than matched and that it was time to "Throw down, as they say." He had expressed with as much jovial care as possible, covering the deeply personal family drama unfolding in front of everyone.

There was a titter from the crowd as his claims fell on deaf ears. Mary removed her diamond ear rings and laid them on top of Edith's necklace. It was clear now that George and Lady Edith had poked a bear in the eye. She seemed to have the boy beat for only a second, before dismay fell over her face, when Martha Levinson stepped forward, plucking out her own diamond earrings. She placed them in George's hands, and gave her granddaughter a trolling look of a great trickster. As she walked away, Martha dismissed Cora's look that demanded that she stop making things worse. But the old woman just waved off her Daughter and Son In-Law's dirty frowns. She had done all of this for a reason and she wanted to see how her prospect would handle it. George slapped down Martha's earrings and smirked just as coldly as his mother.

It was common knowledge that whenever faced with a tiger, to never look it in the eye, as it might misconstrue the expression as a challenge … the same could often be said of Mary Josephine Crawley, who was more like her father than she'd ever admit. Near impossible to fling into a tirade or a rage, but incredibly impulsive when perceiving to be pushed too far.

The tension had been thick as even fog when Mary called for Anna. By then, there had been a chain of communication established from drawing room to downstairs. Thomas, standing by the door, would whisper to Miss Sybbie what was going on. Sybbie would pass it on to Marigold by the grand staircase, who would then rush to the servant's door underneath and into the arms of Anna Bates. There she would whisper to the crouching pretty maid what was going on. Anna would then, in turn, relay the message to the group of servants gathered around the downstairs staircase who wanted to know how Master George was doing. So, when Anna had been rung for, she was already crossing the main stairs. Everyone seemed surprised by the speed in which she arrived, except for Lady Mary, already guessing as to why.

"Mary, stop this at once!"

Her father snapped at the request made of his daughter's Lady's Maid. Anna looked very confused, having to have the order repeated for clarification. There were raised eyebrows and just a bit of salivating anticipation. But the Great Lady of Grantham County looked nowhere but her son in determination. Anna was conflicted, till Mary commanded her to fulfill the request, her red eyes vicious and uncompromising. Robert looked like he had lost his mind, Cora put palm to face, and Tom Branson lectured as it was happening.

Soon enough, shaking her slender hips slowly, Lady Mary drew down her skin tight black sequenced gown. She stood in front of the late night guests in nothing but black opera gloves, and pearl white satin underwear. She draped the mermaid gown over her arm and tossed it down in front of George. There was no shame, only chilled sharpness as she stood in front of George in her smooth and shiny lingerie, arms folded in smugness. The boy had pushed back hard, too hard, and now things were personal, probably more personal than any mother and son should take competition. But then it was a great paradox, because the great passion of feelings between a mother and her child was the only way that things could've been pushed this far.

Mary Crawley, beautiful, and exposed, somehow found a way to make being mostly naked in front of family and peers seem dignified, in the classy way she slipped back in her chair. She had one, slender, creamy leg over the other in lady like fashion, her arms crossed defiantly. She had drawn her trump card. The dress that lay on the pile of already unbelievable wealth, was worth a fortune just on its own. Tom tried to cover her with his jacket, but he received it right back in the face, as Mary Crawley refused to be shamed into decency in this very indecent ambush of her reputation and standing by her own creation, of all people. She was to show this little philistine and everyone what happened when they challenged her …

"Here, help me, Tony."

For one more time, George Crawley was saved, and one more time a look of pure disbelief came over Mary's face. The sound of a zipper turned heads as Lady Mabel Lane Gillingham removed her own gown, standing in maroon slip. Tony, her husband, had protested, but he was cut off by a cutting look from his wife. Wordlessly she placed her expensive Parisian dress in the hands of one which she truly was now convinced would be her son in-law someday. Mary looked stricken, as the other half-naked woman took a seat in her husband's lap, blowing her rival a kiss and giving her a cheeky wink. The beads made a slushing sound against sequence as the boy tossed it on the pile.

The room now was nearly drowned in anticipation of if this was going to escalate further and how this one would end as the build-up was truly more delicious than anyone thought possible. There should be more shock in the room than there actually was at all the clothing being removed. In the Edwardian days there had been many parties that had prompted high born women to take off their clothing, and in the roaring 20's those parties were becoming more and more frequent to the aristocracy. Even Lord and Lady Grantham were reminded of the parties that the young, beautiful, and sleek Cora Crawley had been invited too as a guest of honor in London during the seasons of their early marriage. They were the kind that they really didn't want Robert attending with her.

George and Mary were now at an impasse. The boy had nothing else to bet and neither did his mama, at least nothing she was brave enough to part with, despite her angered sensibilities. Both mother and son had no choice but to finally draw their hand and the whole drawing room had packed in tight to see what was going to happen.

Mary folded down a Full House of Aces and Eights. There was something almost malicious about the tut she was giving George as her gloved hand reached out to start pulling the pile of riches back to her, motioning for Anna to come help her back into her gown. She didn't even entertain the idea that she could lose … but that was till a tiny hand reached over and grabbed her outstretched hand in contrary. George was grinning big and stupidly as he handed his mother his stack of cards. He whistled with his now free two fingers. The beautiful woman folded out his stack of five cards and was in shock at the royal flush of straight hearts.

She had been beaten.

Even more in dismay was the sudden appearance of Sybbie and Marigold who had a big burlap sack as if this had all been planned. George tossed Mabel her gown back, while Marigold put on her mama's necklace. The rest of the stuff was going right into the sack. Still young, they did not realize that the chips had to be cashed in by Harold.

"Now wait a minute, here!" Mary called to the children that were about to make off with her entire evening attire. "George, my dress …" She held her hand out, while with the other arm she blocked her shiny covered breasts. With the madness receding, she finally sobered to the realization that she was in her underwear in front of a crowd of people. They were all now laughing at the little elves that came out of the wood work and were now running off with the spoils of their glorious rebellion.

George Crawley looked smug in his victory. "My dress …" He corrected with a jabbed thumb at himself as he stuffed it in the sack that Sybbie was holding open.

A cold annoyance fell over her lovely pale face. "Fine, your dress, but I still need it." She was starting to become disturbed and frantic at the eyes on her exposed form. She was thankful that Tom had become insistent of his tail's coat.

There was a long pause from George as he thought about it. "Nope …" he shrugged, pulling on his suede jacket again, while a quietly chuckling Tom folded his over Mary's shoulders.

The woman looked to about have lost her mind as she turned to Lady Grantham. "Mama, honestly …" She motioned to the kids with heavy annoyance, who were pillaging the winnings. It had been a plea for some semblance of sanity. Her tone, her look, one might have thought that she was the Lady of the House chastising Nanny for unruly children.

Cora took exception, crossing her arms. "I'm sorry darling, but when you gamble … sometimes you lose." She shook her head as she chastised her girl. Lady Grantham was not a mean or harsh mother, but she had quite gotten out of the business of shielding her girls from pig headed mistakes they authored themselves. Nor did she disagree that no one was too old to learn new lessons, especially her daughters. Robert had told Mary to end the betting. But she pushed her own boy once too often, crossed the line, and was now going to have to find a way to make peace.

When turning back, Lady Mary never looked like she wanted to shake a child more in her life. She pursued them, cornering George and Sybbie by holding the door closed when they tried to open it. Glaring hatefully at their Father Christmas sack filled with her swag, Mary pulled Tom's jacket tighter around herself.

"What's this going to cost me?" She asked with the world's most grudging and spiteful sigh.

Both of the 'Irish twins' started to stroke their fullest and most luxurious of non-existent beards. George turned scheming eyes toward Sybbie smugly, to which she answered immediately with a curt nod and a Cheshire grin.

A few minutes later, the drawing room door opened to the sound of two young children running and giggling. Making wings out their arms, they chased one another, making airplane engine and machine gun sounds. Marigold, still in her mama's necklace and holding onto a lighter sack, was riding Sybbie's back as the victorious rebels made their way to the Servant's Hall to celebrate.

And what a celebration it would turn out to be. Being children, and Crawley's, there was a lack of understanding of the need of money. Lady Mary, having agreed to their terms of paying for movie, candy, popcorn, and pop, they had gotten what they wanted. Tom and Lady Edith would take them to the movies on Saturday. So with all the excess winnings, they decided to give all the money to everyone downstairs. Mr. Mosley and Mrs. Baxter could finally put a down payment on the house they had been looking at for a year. Anna and Bates put their "Bonus" away with their eye on Ripon Grammar for little JJ. Mr. Carson nearly died when he heard the story from Master George of how Mary stripped in front of everyone. The old butler was more than defiant that he would not take any winnings from "His Lady Mary" even when Mrs. Hughes did. But he'd have no choice, and ended up going all the same on Holiday to South Beach in Miami with his wife Elise. He'd even, dare he say it, have a good time.

As the Celebration came to an end, Lady Grantham and Lady Edith came to take the girls to bed. George had given his hugs goodbye and would make his way back to Crawley House, even late in the hour. As he walked through the dark foyer toward the glass doors, he stopped and noticed that someone was watching him at the foot of the grand staircase. It had been his Great-Grandmother Martha. She didn't say anything at first, just seemed to study him.

All her granddaughters had grown up in Downton. They barely came to America but once every five years, and her world somehow did not share their sensibilities. Violet had gotten to Mary, turned the beauty into her creature. Edith was … Edith, an amalgamation of all the worst features of a plain looking, standard, British Debutant, and all of Cora's worst qualities in her personality. She was easy to love, and just as easy to annoy when shown too much affection. Martha had never known Sybil all the well, but she loved her, because Cora thought her special, her perfect baby. But they were all Anglo, Violet had turned them all into the little Insipid English girls that she and Cora used to flatten in the London seasons during "hunting season" and Martha didn't need to be told that all of them felt fairly uncomfortable around her. She had seen some hard times in her youth, and her husband was as new to money as it got. These girls that Violet had fashioned so finely, they wouldn't last in the hard times and struggles that, she knew in her bones, were coming. But just when she had given up on her line, on her and her husband's influence to their own family tree, there was this boy. And George Crawley didn't disappoint. He had a touch of destiny, a touch of greatness that she hadn't seen since she first met her husband all those years ago. He wasn't Violet's creature, he wasn't even his mother's favorite, but he had spirit, more spirit than any Crawley could ever have. She knew that it came from her Cora, it came from her. He took the opportunity she gave him and carried the day not only for himself, but for everyone who could gain from it. He had made lives better tonight. All these children had something to them that their mothers never had. She wanted to foster all of them if she could, but she'd settle for the most spirited. Martha would be dead soon, she knew that. So there was only a short time left to leave her mark on her family.

She'd take George Crawley and America would show him his promise.

George had said goodnight, but Martha only said one thing to him before she turned in. She said it loudly for Mary to hear from her spiteful perch from the overlook, for Robert to hear from the library, and for every damnable ghost that haunted this ridiculous excess of a crypt.

"You're gonna go far, Kid."

When George had finished the story, Matthew was grinning ear to ear despite sad eyes. He had wished that he had been there for that. Had wished he could've seen the look on his beloved Mary's face when she lost. And kiss it away with a chuckle and a pet. She was her most beautiful in complete shock and surprise. When she forgot that she was trying to convince the world that she was a cold and heartless ice sculpture. It was the rare times in which she was just herself. That was when she was his Mary and not anyone else's.

But he also knew that if he had been in the room, there would be no need for the scheme in the first place. There would've never been an atmosphere in which George and Mary would ever be so filled with tension that they were at one another's throats in public. Slowly the smile faded and there was guilt on his face. When he turned he found that George was looking rather the same.

It was a memory that George revered for the celebration downstairs, their lives changed for the better. But it was a victory that he felt shame in. No one truly ever wanted to best a parent. There was something right in losing to a person who gave life to you, who taught you the very thing you competed in. There was dignity in the loss. Beating Lady Mary over the years, in order to prove a point, had made George famous throughout the county. He had been known as 'The Great Lady Mary Offender' by all people in the village and on the farms. There was never a greater cure for the bullying, uppity Minx than crossing blades with her own son, who always found a way to turn the tables on London Society's famous and beloved brat. Whither it had been a round of witty insulting repartee or through some competition like cards or racing the Point to Point. George had always found a way to best her, and all it ever did was cause the problems between them to intensify. And though no one had thought it possible from the way he liked to rub it in, he felt quite guilty when he was finally alone.

But it was the card game in particular that he judged himself harshly over.

At the time he had been angry at her for the things asked of him on that faithful Christmas Eve and the blame that had fell on him like a ton of bricks afterward. Going to the movies had been something he had wanted to do so badly and there was Mary Crawley once again trying to punish him for all her own mistakes. He hadn't taken into account the sorrow and lonesome feelings of her superficial world. George had never given a thought of how the death of his Great-Grandmother Violet had affected his mother, how dark a place she had been at the loss of a woman she had loved and been so close too. And when she had been her rawest and most vulnerable, George had humiliated her completely. Though vaulted as a hero by many upstairs and most downstairs, there was nothing heroic about what he had done to his mother that night. He hadn't wanted to just win the movie tickets for Sybbie and himself, George wanted to destroy her, and he had. In one hand of poker he had made Lady Mary Crawley the laughingstock of society for months afterward. With the death of Granny Violet, heartless suitors with perverse intentions, and still feeling the loss of everything that she had built for herself after his father's death, George didn't just darken her already cloudy horizon … he had made it into a typhoon to be weathered.

George and Mary would come against one another in competition one last time at a Point to Point race in his return to Downton after eight years in America. But it was their Grandmother Martha's poker game in which it was cemented that they'd never reconcile and George was convinced that his mother would never forgive him. A sentiment clearly felt when his great-grandmother came to talk to his mother and Granny Cora about fostering him in America. It was a conversation that lasted only a few moments, in which his mother had agreed almost immediately. The boy believed that the bitter widow had wanted George out of sight and out of her life as quickly as possible. It filled George with a lot of attitude and anger that would last him for many years afterward.

He'd earn his title as 'The Great Offender' with his sharp rebukes of his mother that he never missed a chance to take. All the great love that a little boy had for the woman, buried deep inside, had turned to hate in the teenager who returned. The face offs that happened in that year between America and the Colonial Mid-East were more overt and deeply personal. George didn't avoid, tip-toe, or walk on egg shells around Lady Mary as the boy had. Walking from Crawley House to Downton for invited breakfasts was usually opened with a casual and impudent smack on Mary's hind end as he passed her to the table while she served herself. She'd glare bitterly after her sharp gasp and spilt eggs. It was a start of a day of back handed insults and clear ones lobbed at one another at the luncheon and dinner table. George had no time or respect for the effete snob that was worshipped like a malevolent queen. Meanwhile, Mary had no patience for a young man who had the most impeccable breeding of the highest class and after eight years in Depression America had become a wild, undisciplined, cowboy who thumbed his nose at the traditions that he was supposed to uphold for future generations. The two were at constant war, worse than Mary and Edith ever were. Everything was a competition, a contest, and the prize was goading the other into escalation that Tom Branson had to put an end too before it got out of hand. George had come home and effectively challenged the shiny princess, rubbing her face in the mud. He had beaten her so much in those days, and he had done it in the worst ways possible, that he was sure that he had made everyone miserable in his fiery teenage anger.

Five years later it made George ashamed of himself.

He never put it together, never realized, in his crusade to tarnish their goddess of charm and beauty, how sick his Grandmother Isobel had become before his crossing over the Atlantic. It had been hidden from him, from everyone but his mother and granny. It never occurred to him till much later, sitting alone, after barely surviving Dunkirk that it might have something to do with it. That in his rush to think the worst of his mother, that she might have been trying to protect him from living in a house, living with the sight, day in and day out, of a woman he loved, so slowly, lose her lucid mind. She was a woman forever living in her memories that obscured her reality. Upon his return, Isobel Crawley spent every morning writing him a note for a nursing course at a training college in York. Telling him that she thought his willingness to help the war effort was so noble. She'd tell him when Sybbie would stay the night that Cora and Robert wouldn't like him taking up with the chauffer, but that he was a grown woman and could make his own decisions.

In all his time in Crawley House, it hurt more than any injury he ever had that his Grandmother, truly one of only two mother figures he had ever known, alternated between confusing him with his Aunt Sybil and his Mother, never knowing who he really was. It was a pain that would never go away, when he would arrive home and was greeted by a crestfallen old woman who had such hope in her tired eyes.

" _Oh, hello Mary, I thought you might be Matthew. You know he's quite missed his train, if you've come to see him. I do hope he hurries back or he might miss dinner, I had Mrs. Bird make his favorite tonight too …"_

He had never been convinced, but a part of him was sure that his mother had tried to protect him from that. But he had been so angry at her, that George took the pain and punishment of sitting up with his Grandmother every night, waiting on a son, on a father, who would never come home. She'd fall asleep watching the window, sadly hoping her boy would walk through the garden. As George, glassy eyed, draped a blanket over Isobel, she would smile sadly, telling him as she drifted away to sleep that he needed to tell Matthew how he felt about him, before it was too late. Afterward, George would sit in his father's chair in that and over the face of his hanging head in sorrow.

Months later, as she died, Isobel Crawley mustered all the will power left in her to say how wonderful she thought the wedding dress looked, and after a seemingly sobering pause, her eyes were alight with so much care and hope when she gasped how much Matthew loved him. After she fell silent and motionless, George never knew if she had been lucid in those final seconds, knowing who he was. Or if she was outside the church at his parent's wedding, talking to his mother.

It had, after all, been the happiest day of all of their lives.

"My dear chap … is everything alright?"

There was nothing but a priestly compassion in the soldier's voice when he noticed a sparkling speck on George's cheek. The young man, who had been quietly lost in the cause and effect of his childhood wars, hadn't noticed that the memories of his Grandmother's final year had brought a single tear to his eye. After everything that happened that day, he felt emotionally compromised. So many things, being in this place again, came flooding to him. Old emotions, old loves, and even older memories came over him in these familiar settings after nearly twelve years away from them.

George cleared his throat. "Air pressure … still adapting to ground level." His voice had a stony quality to it as he wiped his eye, looking away. Matthew's face fell into a sorrowful lilt, lifting his hand to place on the youth's shoulder. He didn't know what it was that was troubling him, but he was there now, he could help.

He wanted to help so desperately.

But suddenly there was a rustle of the misty undergrowth in the forest to their left. Matthew heard it, but had dismissed it, taking George's advice to lighten up. He was no stranger to danger or a battlefield, but he had hardly expected to find it here, outside the provincial village of Downton. But the pilot had stopped so suddenly. If he had been a rabbit, Matthew could've imagined that one of his boy's long floppy ears would've stood straight up and twitched. Being in this kind of situation before, George Crawley knew the difference between a little frigid wind pushing mist through a tree line, and actual movement from a third party.

George raised a fist ear level to motion them to stop. "Quiet …" He muttered, listening hard.

His father had never been a good soldier, he had done his part, and he knew the basics of it. But trench warfare was far different than being above ground in nature. The city boy at heart had learned how rubbish he had been at it from his patrol with William. Losing his sense of direction, they had ended up right behind enemy lines, running into a German reserve picket. By the end of the war tanks had made trenches a thing of the past, and Matthew had been quite sure that after Amiens, he might not have lasted long outside the trench. He was an old dog that didn't take to new tricks very well.

There was something different about the way the wind carried amongst the trees, the ripple of branches lasting longer than they should have. Figures and shadows were moving out of the mist, their voices hushed and hard as they stumbled from the trees. He didn't realize he was frozen still till George drew his revolver with a flick.

"Get off the road!"

 **CRACK!**

 **CRACK!**

 **CUFF!**

 **BOOM!**

* * *

 **Playlist** (Experiment)

"It's a Long Road" – Jerry Goldsmith (First Blood)

"The Red River Valley" - Suzy Boggus (Just imagine the lyrics in Spanish)

 _The great chase from Fifth Avenue to Harper's Ferry_

"Coming Down From Red Lodge - Peter Ostroushko

 _The Nursery Rebellion/ The Betting War_

"Take Me Out To The Ballgame" - Jacqueline Schwab

 _Isobel's Final Months_

"Grandma's Theme" (Piano) - Wind Waker

 _George & The Lady Nurse (Bonus)_

"Can You Hear Your Heart" - Hans Zimmer (George & Sybil 's theme)


	10. It's a Long Road - Part II

**It's A Long Road: Part II**

 _The Thunder Rolls_

* * *

 _ **New York City**_

 _ **1932**_

Soft amber colored the night sky as the flickering glow of lamplight off the brownstones created a strange iridescent mixture of oranges and yellow that blotted the stars out in the night sky. During the day, this great and bustling city, the center of the world commerce, seemed to be a beacon of hope and a symbol of freedom. It was the very epicenter in one's mind and imagination of all that was possible in one lifetime's work. You too could live in such finery in just one generation. From a boat to Ellis Island, it seemed, with lady Liberty hoisting her torch, that anything was possible. But it was in the night, in the soft shadows that hung over this eruption of stone, glass, and metal from the pavement below, this same world changes. In the neon glow and through the steaming mist of manholes the shadows flicker and dance through the streets. And in the darkness of the alley ways the echo of suffering and malcontent reverberate off the concrete like the tenured chorus of a tragic opera. Within darkness, the great and famous skyline of deco buildings, with their snarling thirteenth floor gargoyles, took the frightening shape of a metal and concrete outline of a hellhound's bared fangs.

In this awful city, there is no escaping the darkness that surrounds the ambitions that drive the everyday man, the impoverished immigrant, and the rich politician. All who were bent on never dancing with the ghosts of the old world that always haunt their consciousness in these very witching hours. But in the night there was no escaping the memories, the terror, and the fears of what might be over the horizon, what had already come. In this city, at the center of a social revolution, the fears and vices take lustful and seductive shapes in the neon shadows that flicker in advertisement for you to bring your worst worldly impulses to be indulged for a price … always a price. In this time, in this place, the very cobbled streets were infected by the uncertainty of a country on the brink. No one knew what tomorrow would bring, if there would even be a tomorrow.

And thus New York, the beacon of the new world, was a city run and ruled by fear.

And where fear thrived, sickness and desperation followed. The filth of the human imagination, the capability of such depravity was washed down the gutters and piled in the back alleys with the rest of the trash. And in an unjust world, the powerful relished their control and indulged in the darkness for free, taking advantage of those who relied on such base nature of those untouchables as a means of survival. It was a contract between those drunk on power and the desperate, a mutual dependency of degeneracy in this great rock bottoming of all the pleasure and freedom of a decade they once called "The Roaring 20's". Now they both clung to all the filth and deviancy that remained of those days while the rest of the world fell apart around their immoral orgy.

Every day more and more vagrants wandered aimlessly from Central Park through the steaming streets, looking for work, food, any sort of shelter from the bitter autumn that whispered in the breeze that winter would soon be coming. And then there would be more dead bodies in the nooks and crannies already filled with skeletons. They all clung to the belief that there was something great on the horizon. That the age of Gin Alley and Flappers would return to the city, to the world. This depression was nothing but a minor setback. So, till then, they did all they could to remain to what they had once known so well. So they might return to all the old places they had once ruled. All of them hoped, beyond hope, that the brilliance of two generations ago, the industrialists, would return.

Because, once, long ago, these homeless gentlemen and ragged great ladies were the "New Money" that made their fortunes and shipped their daughters off to England for a title.

But in the ancient and modest row houses that lined the old cobble streets, the fall of the new money, ancient rivals of the Knickerbockers, the oldest families of New York society, was a thing that had been celebrated. For forty years, the unrestricted opulence, the vulgar lavishness, and the European sensibilities that invaded their purely Dutch-American influences had finally come to an end. Over-night all the interlopers with English aristocrat son-in-laws had fallen to disgrace, bankrupt, with their great mansions closed and abandoned. Those who did not kill themselves in '29 they often found on car rides through Central Park, standing on some street corner in their old finery, offering their "services" for a price. After years of their conservative lifestyles being mocked, their hubris in their wealth called snobbish. The world had fallen back to a simpler time, to a modest time. The New Money was gone, but the old was alive and well. After all, they were the founders of New Amsterdam, the oldest families of New York.

They were too well respected, too well known, and just too big to fail.

One might have thought that the streets upon where they lived were a row of embassies, of important palatial quarters of the masters of the universe. Day in and day out on every street corner from Manhattan to Brooklyn the homeless and the unemployed wandered from shop to shop, looking for work, for scraps, for anything to improve their unfortunate situations. But on the Knickerbocker dwellings there was no foot traffic, no vagrants or wretch looking for handouts. There was nothing but the occasional car driving by, a make and mark that was to standard with what the people who lived in these neighborhoods considered up to snuff.

In the quiet of the night, there was nothing but the distant echo of traffic and clacking horse shoes on the busy avenues below. Stillness enraptured the barren street where the modesty of the homes was reflected in the lamps that lit the pavement and cobblestone. For a long distance you could hear the shuffling footsteps and the casual whistling of the beat police officer that patrolled the neighborhood. His Billy club rattled as he ran it across the cast iron barred fences of the row houses. The Irishman twirled his stick with a finger lopped into the leather strap as he paced the street in boredom. His breath was visible in thick froths of the frigid autumn night. Turning the corner, he frowned as he continued.

Finally there was something interesting that could be found in the otherwise unexciting patrol of the Old Dutch homes.

Parked in front of one of the houses was an old but opulent carriage, the kind that had been used for society balls and grand heiress weddings back in the 80's and 90's. It was glimmering, perfectly restored, with white, glistening, polish, and golden embroidery that matched its wheels. The two horses that drew the carriage were great white stallions, stately, and certifiably magnificent to behold. The driver was a tall and slender man, in a powder blue frock coat and tight velvet knee high pants of an old livery. On his feet was a pair of black polished buckle shoes and long wool white socks. While on his head was a great white powdered wig.

The beat cop moved passed the showy evidence of an age long past. The driver looked to be positively in torment of his costume, scratching underneath his wig. Upon closer inspection, it would seem that the thin man was merrily some lad scooped off the street based on the fact that he knew how to drive a carriage. Maybe he had driven a taxi before the Stock Market fell, or he had worked for some great family of wealth that had fallen with the rest of their kind. Either way, he certainly didn't look like a man who'd complain after four years of living through this Depression.

Any work was good work in this city.

After treating a greeting, the policeman strolled away. Looking back over his shoulder, he continued to glance at the lavished antique and fancy costuming that sat there. He could've questioned why the man was here and what it was all about. But he knew that anybody who had enough money to restore such a vehicle and provide such horse flesh had more than enough money to be in this neighborhood. He paused again when he reached the other side of the street. There a boy sat perched on a mountain of newspapers. A rolled up front page of the evening edition was in his hand as he looked out at the horse and carriage from over his spot.

"You don't see that every day, do ya, boyo?" He commented.

"Nope, not every day. Just twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays." The boy replied absently suspicious.

The cop made an amused noise. "Makes you wonder just what they're doing in there?" He crossed his arms sharing the view with the Paperboy.

"It does, doesn't it?" He was rhetorical in his quiet answer.

Hearing the dark and worried way the paper seller spoke, he turned to look down at the young man. He was a young pre-teen, with a battered looking brown corduroy jacket, cap, and black slacks. He wore a navy blue scarf that was wrapped and looped around his neck. It was almost dark enough to be black. He could hardly see his dark blue eyes under the shade of the brim of his cap. But the shadowing made him look even more mysterious in the light. Instinct told him that there was more going on, but then the paperboy was just a kid. Plus he wore a shamrock pin on his lapel that made him smile.

"Ah, Notre Dame fan, are ya?" He asked.

The boy didn't peal his eyes off the house that the carriage was parked in front of. "Isn't everyone?" He had enough piece of mind to look up and give the roughest of cocky grins to the policeman.

To the shared camaraderie of fandom for the College Football team, the beat cop smiled back. Reaching into his pocket, the man removed a dime and flipped it to the paperboy. The boy caught it while the Irishman bent down and plucked the evening edition from the boy's hand.

"Keep the change." He ruffled his cap. "Have a grand night, me lad." Responding to the kindness with a two fingered salute, the paperboy watched the cop walk on, whistling the Notre Dame Fight Song as he disappeared into the shadow of the night.

When he was gone, George Crawley removed his cap. A head full of perfect raven curls fell out from underneath. All that was left of the old George who had lived at Downton was a distinguishing streak of blond hair that stubbornly clung to the past while the rest of it had turned to his mother, Aunt Sybil, and Granny's coloring. He ran his hand through his grown out locks, before refitting his cap over his head. With a long frothing sigh, visible in the cold street lamp light, he checked his great-grandfather's pocket watch.

It was time.

The truth was that George Crawley wasn't here to sell papers. He was here to figure out what _she_ had been doing every Tuesday and Thursday night. It had started a few months ago when she said that someone had paid her a call, and that they had a position for her husband, well paying, and benefits. It had been too good of an opportunity to pass up in these hard times. He had gotten the job a week later, just as she started leaving on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She had told them that she had society meetings. Being first name with all these women of the old high society could only help her husband's position. Butter up her husband's employers wife with her trade mark charm and boundless optimistic energy. It was not so foreign an idea to George, and it was, after all, the kind of thing that she was born and bred for. But despite all that, the boy was suspicious, though he was conscious not to pry into her private business since they came to live with him on Fifth Avenue. In truth it seemed normal, she'd come home all smiles and energetic, maybe even glowing a little. She had been overjoyed at first that she was back in her element of society life. But even as she sat down on the couch in the dusty and ancient Levinson Library of San Sochi Mansion, chattering away of her day to him, George could tell that there was something off, uncomfortable, even traumatized in her eyes.

She looked as if she was in shock.

But it wasn't till last week, as he slept in his Granny's old room, the boy knew that something wasn't right.

It was on his day off from his newspaper corner, selling 'The Planet' when he was awoken by her. It was nearly dawn on that Friday morning and she was standing in the elegant gown that she had left in that Thursday night. She had been crying, something he had never seen her do before. She explained that she didn't want her husband, or their children seeing her like this. But she didn't want to be alone. She was nearly angelic in her vulnerable beauty and in the little girl like innocence when she asked if she could crawl into bed with him. George didn't blink in scooting over as she slipped off her shoes and slid under the sheets with him. She was quiet for a long moment, staring at his Granny's ceiling as they lay side by side.

And then she started to cry.

She had come undone so hard and so violently that it frightened George. When he turned she was sobbing hysterically with a deep shame in her eyes. He remembered crawling on top of the sobbing woman and holding her tightly, burying his face into her silken bosom. There was a strange mixture of assorted high class women's perfumes that stained her supple smooth skin. He could hear her heart thrashing in her breast and the wheezing of her ugly sobbing as she curled into his arms, crying into his curls as she held him tightly in her silky gloved arms. She fell asleep together in the cocoon they made for themselves and when she woke up, she had acted like nothing had happened.

She kissed his face, told him that she loved him, and bound off to be the beautiful and fun mommy and the lovingly attentive wife to her family downstairs. But George didn't forget the way she had looked so broken when he turned over. He was so suddenly reminded of his Mama before Cora died, when she was asking him to do the impossible. It was that helpless look of shame and despair that sent him out into the cold then and it was what sent him out into the cold now.

And this time he'd be ready for anything.

When the Stock Market had crashed, young George was in Seattle. For three weeks it seemed that the whole world was in chaos as he rushed back to Cincinnati. He had only even been in America for a year and it seemed in those days that there wouldn't be an America left by the next one. By time he arrived there was a rumor of a riot at the Levinson dry goods factory. George's Great-Granny Martha, who was already gone, instructed him in a note to take the train to New York and hold up at San Sochi on Fifth Avenue till everything settled down. She was going to New Orleans and check on her family property there.

It was the last time anyone had heard from her.

George arrived just in time for a daring last moment escape as he made off with his Granny's girlhood treasures as the mob was marching down the street. When the union teamsters burned down the Levinson home, painting " **KIKE** " on the smoldering ruins, Cora's childhood memories were the only things that remained that showed that there was ever a Levinson family in Ohio.

When he arrived in New York, George had found that the entire Fifth Avenue mansion had been completely abandoned. The cook, the footmen, the maids, they had all ran off in the night. San Sochi was not as big as Downton Abbey, but it was still formidable, sporting many opulent rooms and halls that were recreations of some of the most famous of European Palaces. And the small boy found himself utterly alone within them.

He had tried to call Martha, but it seemed that the plantation that she and Cora had been raised on did not have a phone. He had asked that the lady at least send a message, but that cost money, money that George didn't have, that no one had. It was the same story for any sort of messaging between England and New York. He had tried to contact his Aunt Edith's magazine, Donk and Granny, and even his Uncle Tom. He wanted to go home. But he didn't have any money for passage. George didn't even have the means to send his SOS letters. But then he considered the likelihood of anyone coming for him, with exception of maybe his Aunt Edith, it was a very slim prospect even in theory. George had been convinced that he had been exiled here for a reason, and it was because his mama didn't want him anymore.

So he never posted the letters, even when he did have the money.

For weeks he wandered the vast aging halls, listened to Notre Dame Football and Dodger Baseball games on the radio, and read from the books in the library, cooking for himself from the things that Mrs. Patmore had taught him to make or he had seen Daisy prepare. In the stillness of the night, he had become so scared, all alone, with not a soul in the gilded, ageing, American palace. Terrified of going to sleep with no one to guard the vastness, he sat in the drawing room wrapped in a blanket from his Granny's old bedroom. With his father and Aunt Sybil's revolver on the sitting table next to him, he held close the tiny Great Dame with the bejeweled collar for comfort and waited for someone to come for him.

But no one ever did.

A month afterward, someone had shut off the power. He found a note stuck to the door, saying that no one paid the electricity bill. It came as quite a shock to George, seeing as he didn't realize that you had to pay for electricity. Going to the power company office, George was informed by the regional manager, who was confused after rushing to summoning of the Master of San Sochi only to find a boy, that the bill was quite steep. Walking back home, praying that no one had robbed the place while he was gone, George figured that he could do without electricity till late-autumn, in which case he could sell the silver.

To that point George had been selling off European paintings bought by Martha on her and his Granny's European tours during the educational leg of Cora's transformation from a teenage queen still preoccupied by childish playthings into an American Princess. The prized works that brought such standing in the haughty New York social circles was now paying for their grandson's groceries, hygiene, and water. He mended his clothing by candle light with stitches that Mrs. Baxter and Anna had taught him and listened to his Uncle Harold's old crank gramophone. He read and used Cora's old text books to teach himself Math and Science while he waited for his Aunt Edith or Donk to come get him.

But eventually it was mid-November and he was still alone. It had come time to sell the silver to pay for electricity. He had cleaned it the way that Mr. Carson had taught him and stuffed it in an old potato sack. With a rustling clanking, he walked down the street, figuring that it would be more than enough to pay for heat till March. By that time, someone, Martha, Harold, his Aunt Edith, Uncle Tom, surely at least his Granny would come looking for him after missing for so long. But on his way to the selling place, he had been stopped by a group of older Italian kids. They had offered to carry the sack for the boy, to which George told them he was fine and could manage. Suddenly, they had jumped him. The boy had gotten a few good punches in, but eventually they had overwhelmed him. They beat him up, and ran off with his family's silver, leaving the boy, in the torn up suede jacket, lying in an alley as the season's first snow began to fall.

Getting his head back, he found that he was lying next to a trashcan fire in a makeshift hobo camp. He was dragged there by an older colored boy, who gave him a sip of his papa's home brew and helped him back home. He told George that his momma was a good Christian woman and if she saw him ignore a person in need the way all the other people had, than she'd never forgive him. Like George, Jonah had been exiled from home in Louisiana. Though unlike George it wasn't out of a lack of affection of a mother, but rather that the times had become so tough on their share cropping farm, that his daddy told him that they just couldn't afford him anymore and that he had to go. So he had come to New York City in hopes of finding a job. Yesterday he celebrated his thirteenth birthday. George had offered him a room in the dark and cold San Sochi, but Jonah gratefully declined. The work was where he was staying and if he got up early enough he could find him some. Plus … it had heat. But he promised he knew where to find those "Guinea Bastards" if he wanted his things back.

It was cold in the empty halls of the mansion, the snowflakes shadowed on the far wall and the broken hearted face of a boy sitting alone. For the first time since baby Cora died, a beaten and bruised George hugged his stuffed dog and cried. He had been completely alone for most of a year and no one knew where he was and he had no way of telling them either. He was poor, cold, and so utterly alone in a house filled with the phantoms of lavish ambitions that ended at Downton Abbey, a place he was no longer welcome. He wanted to give up, to just lie there with the little doggy and blanket. But there was something inside of him, something that just wouldn't stand for it. It wasn't in him to be defeated so easily, George didn't lose, and maybe that made him sound like his mama, but then he wasn't in the situation in which he could honestly feel ashamed of that. By the time the night was over, the last strands of the boy that had left Downton was gone.

Afterward, George Crawley never sounded British again.

The next day the boy broke off a leg from a Sixteenth Century, Louis XVI chair, and placed fake Spanish Galleons made of heavy copper in a roll of paper. Grabbing his scarf and cap, a new George Crawley left San Sochi. Jonah greeted him like a friend at the designated spot and told him where to fine the Sicilians' hideout. The immigrant boys were shooting dice, and cursing at one another, when a boy with his cap pulled low and new scarf covering mouth and nose burst through the door with his makeshift club. When their leader, a skinny boy that was all lean muscle and tendon, sent the biggest of the group after George, the boy reared back and swung the chair leg. He busted the older boy's knee, and when he fell to his uninjured one, George set up and swung his chair leg club like a baseball bat. It broke over the older kid's face. After he hit the ground in a heap, with a bleeding ear, George stepped over their fallen gang member and demanded the suddenly unnerved immigrant boys return his silver.

Seeing that he outweighed the smaller kid in the disguise, their leader told "The Shadow" that he can have it if he could get through him. What he didn't count on was that George Crawley had fought with bullies before, and was taught how to deal with them from the fighting experience of one Mr. John Bates. George waited for the olive skinned boy's attack, before he timed his shot just right, hitting the Sicilian in the mouth with a fist gripping a roll of large galleons. While the immigrant boy was staggered, the smaller charged forward and tackled him to the rotted wooden planks. The two boys rolled around the old, dusty, and abandoned colonial shop's floor. When George finally maneuvered himself on top he gripped hard the immigrant's shirt, and pulled the boy up into a punch to his nose. He continued to hit the Sicilian till they were all alone, his flunkies running the minute their alpha was pinned.

All the frustration and anger of a young life of disappointment and heartache was unleashed on the young immigrant. He didn't stop hitting him till the copper coins were clinking on the floor and the older of the two made sucking noises from his bloody and disjointed Roman nose. In tears and chest heaving, George finally got off his opponent. Angrily, he kicked the kid over and pulled off the older boy's too big brown corduroy jacket and put it on. Since he had ruined his jacket, then he'd take his in reparation of the mugging. Recovering his sack of silver, the disguised youth left the Sicilian a broken nose, bleeding mouth, and shivering in the cold.

When he entered the store with a ring of the bell, the upper crust customers turned and stared at the young boy with a black eye, cut lip, gashed bridge of the nose, and a tear strewn face. George dropped the sack of silver on the counter. Hans, an old German man who had been doing business with the boy for months, seemed sympathetic when he saw his favorite junior dealer. A Knickerbocker woman who was shopping at the store made enquires when she saw the crest on the silver. The boy refused to answer her mocking tone when she saw the blackening curls and damaged, but familiar facial features. Hans, seeing the stoic faced lad absorbing the abuse from the haughty Dutch decedent, an old enemy of Levinson and Crawley alike, offered a more generous price in admiration. Taking it, the boy said nothing at the collecting of his substantial financial gain, while the woman hurled parting insults at a Ms. Cora Levinson who she claimed played with dolls till the day she was married. There was not a person in the high end store that do not relish the fall of the Levinson family, and would gladly anticipate throwing a grand victory ball upon hearing the end of the House of Grantham. Every one of them would let the last of both hated names know it as he left the store in roaring mockery.

George paid the power bill and demanded, like the Lord he would someday become, that it be turned on by that night. Feeling the sting of the cold and his beating physically, and the insults hurled at his grandmother and family from the Knickerbockers emotionally, he returned to San Sochi. He was tired, cold, hungry, and sad when he entered the abandoned mansion.

But that was when he heard familiar voices talking.

In the drawing room Lady Edith was standing in a long fur lined coat and hat. She looked worried and glassy eyed as she stood in the middle of the room. Lady Rose Aldridge was sitting in George's chair, reading his math equations, announcing she wouldn't know how to do half of them. When they turned they found a beaten, tired, shivering George standing in the foyer watching them, hoping, praying, that it wasn't a dream.

Someone had finally found him.

Edith burst into tears upon seeing the boy, her champion's boy. George sprang with a limp to his aunt, who swept him into her arms. She cried quietly as she held him tightly, his injuries only making her feel wretched. Edith had explained how no one knew where he was. Back in England, Ripon and Thirsk was in chaos, the unemployed factory workers had destroyed Uncle Tom and his Mama's shop, and there was not enough money from the estate to go across the sea and look for him. Rose and Atticus had fallen on difficult times themselves and did not know where George was, nor had the finances to look for him in a wide net from Seattle to Cincinnati. It was only by Bertie pulling diplomatic strings as a Marquis that got Edith over to New York on chance that he was at San Sochi.

That night was the first night that George had slept peacefully in almost a year. He could be a kid once more in the guarded arms of his loving aunt, the only one who came back for him. He was happy to go somewhere else to eat rather than the vast, empty, kitchen where he made his dinners or the hot dog cart a few blocks away. Every night when he crawled into bed with Lady Edith, he felt safe, felt loved. But the experience had changed him. There was shock, disappointment, and a little bit of sorrow when he told her that he wouldn't be returning home. His heart was filled with too much hurt and anger at his family, especially at his mother, who should've been here, not his aunt. After all he had gone through; he couldn't see himself back in Downton or going to Brancaster to live with her and Marigold. And tragically he couldn't see himself being welcomed into either home with open arms.

Later, it would haunt Edith, when she had her chance to tell the boy the truth. It was in fact his mother Mary who had told her where to find George. Upon the Stock Market falling, Lady Mary Crawley had spent every pound she had and later could swindle from her suitors in order to find her son. And it was only that Lady Mary was not a diplomatic attaché, and could not make the trip to America as to why she wasn't there now. There was no grave instruction from her sister to bring George home, but she was not so wholly clueless as to understand the unspoken implication of Mary wanting him back at Downton. Whither they got along or didn't, Lady Mary didn't want her boy alone in such a dangerous and chaotic place. Edith wasn't sure why she stayed quiet. But in reality it was that after all these years of neglect, Edith wouldn't stand to allow her sister to carry the day as a hero so suddenly, only to abandon the boy once again when he got his hopes up. It wasn't till she returned to Downton and relayed George's blame at Mary's feet as to why he didn't come back, that she knew it was wrong. Fore she saw the very heartbroken disappointment in Mary's eyes that was barely contained by her beautiful icy veneer. "Very well …" was all Mary said emotionlessly. Afterward, holding a crying Marigold who wanted her best friend back, Lady Edith would feel horribly guilty for the rest of her life, knowing she had destroyed any chance of reconciliation between mother and son.

While in New York, knowing the dire situation that Rose and Atticus were in, and the deal that the Marchioness of Hexham had made with the Power Company with diplomatic threats, George offered the Aldridge's room and board completely free. That way he wouldn't be alone, and he could keep control of the mansion he fought so hard to protect. Lady Edith was extremely reluctant to agree, based on not wanting to leave George in such a dreadful situation in a country in chaos. But more accurately, she did not trust Rose to watch him, as Edith, more than anyone, knew of the beauty's faults and quirks that often times made her seem a peer of George's rather than his primary guardian.

Nearly two years later it was the one stipulation that ran through his mind as well, as he crossed the quiet street.

Darting swiftly, the young figure snuck around the carriage to get behind it. Crouching low, the boy settled his hand on the gilded wheel spokes. From the blind spot, he watched the twin stallions wicker and stamp their majestic hoofs with claps on cobblestone. They were trying to stay warm on the late January night. Taking a cue from his favorite Pulp and radio show character, he pulled his scarf up over his nose and lowered his cap. From inside his pocket he drew a tiny cardboard pack of burnt orange. Across the cover was bombastic Cantonese scroll. Quietly he opened the flap of his usual buy during his walkabouts in Chinatown. He removed a black pellet, and distanced himself from the wheel.

SNAP!

SNAP!

SNAP!

The footmen was cursing the cold in Polish, scratching his scalp, when suddenly sharp noises broke the eerie quiet of the night. Little sparks were popping right at the horses' feet, causing them to cry in alarm. He tried to rein in the suddenly wild stallions that were rearing on the Hine legs. But it was too late. The horses began fleeing the scene as fast as possible. Polish expletives echoed down the shadowy lit street as the carriage rocketed down the cobblestone.

As they disappeared, there was just the slightest smirk on George's face, as he pocketed his Chinese noise makers. Looking around to make sure that the coast was clear, he scurried to the iron barred fence. Quietly and smoothly he scaled it, perching between spikes carefully. He looked down below and saw that beyond the iron fencing was a trench in the form of a long concrete moat where there were trash cans and bottles set aside. Clearly a place where the servants did their menial labors that required fresh air. Climbing down, George hung off the fence with one arm, slowly lowering himself, before he let go. His shoes barely made a clap on the grey stone when he landed in a crouch.

Sidling against the house, on the off chance that one of the maids or footman would be walking out with the trash or empty bottles, he slowly inched forward. Overhead he heard a string quartet play old waltzes and the tinkle of glasses. Someone was throwing a party. With a look up, he saw moving shadows from the reflection of light above. It was on the ground floor, while the kitchens and servant quarters were in the basement windows.

Switching sides in the trench, he moved quickly in the gaps between the servant hall windows, till he reached the trash cans. Above was the rain gutter. He squinched his eyes shut at the rickety noise the aluminum made as he climbed on top. He wanted a few more seconds to regain balance but he didn't have the time when he heard the door opening to the downstairs hall. He jumped and caught the rain gutter just as a portly man in an apron arrived with a broom.

"Alright, ya devils, who wants some?!" He announced.

George was very still, not even breathing, as the assistant cook pushed trash cans around with his handle. While he looked for Alley Cats, he never noticed a worn leather shoe that was just dangling over his bald spot. Not seeing any sport, the man sheathed his broom and walked back inside. After a moment, George let out a breath of relief and climbed up the pipe till he reached the window overlooking the party.

He was instantly confused.

The ballroom looked as if it could fit fifty, maybe seventy-five, if no one was interested in dancing. And there were fifty figures inside. But maybe five of them were actually people. The rest of the wood paneled ballroom with a pearl white dance floor was filled with mannequins. They were dressed in old world fashion of modest cuts, and even more modest evening gowns for the female ones. There were all of different seasons from some fifty to forty years back. All of them set up as if they were attending the exclusive ball.

It was the strangest and scariest thing George had ever seen.

Amongst the living, there was not a single male. They were older women his granny's age, and even older, wearing the same old world cuts of modesty, some opulence of the French design, but certainly nothing flashy. There was only one person in the ballroom that stood out from the crowd. She was smiling and conversing, carrying a spirited conversation … with a mannequin.

The slender woman was very young and stunningly beautiful, as compared to the older middle aged women in the room trying to revive their looks with heavy makeup and wigs. Her golden locks were gorgeously styled with a satiny bow at the top of a cascade of perfect ringlets that traveled down her back. George not only knew the young woman, but was annoyed to see the evening ball gown she wore. It was a blue Worth dress that was uniquely made for Cora Levinson on the night she had first met her soul mate in a Ballroom in Newport. Still silken, glimmering, and perfectly beautiful many years later, it fit the young woman like a glove. It steamed George, because, she knew that the dress was too important to his granny, to his mother aunt, and to him to take it out and wear it. He couldn't fathom what she was thinking. If anything happened to it, it would be him in trouble, not her.

His anger was forgotten though when he saw a strange pattern start to form. The older women would converse amongst themselves, watching their, younger, costumed, guest talk to mannequins. Then, at the song change, one of the Knickerbocker women would wander over, take the young woman's hand and began to dance with her in the middle of the room. One by one, they'd pass her around between fake conversations. Each one of them signaling to the string musicians, costumed as Rococo French Courtiers, to play their favorite song. It was as if each one of them was employing the young woman in some ballroom fantasy that they've been waiting decades to play out.

And the beautiful young woman was their prize.

The youth quietly watched on for a few moments, before his arms started getting tired, and his curiosity was too peaked to ignore. So he left the sight of one of the women he recognized from the store in which she berated him for being a member of his Granny's family, whispering something into the young beauty's ear. Climbing up a floor higher, the boy decided that it was time he have a closer look. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a switchblade. Flipping it open, he wedged the blade into the center of the twin window panes. Jimmying the point inside, he pushed up the lock pin. With a muted thunk, the windows nearly flew open.

The inside of the home was warm and had a distinctive smell of aged wood and cider in the fall harvest atmosphere. Climbing through the window, the boy closed the fidgety glass panes. The sound of classical music echoed through the hall at full tilt, bombastic and fast. There was something strangely unbalanced by the sound of it. George could almost feel the insanity and anxiety in the swirl of the fantasy of the old woman as he watched her dance with the younger from his stealthy perch behind the railings of the stairs. They spun and twirled around the dance floor, knocking down mannequins. The older woman was aggressive in her lead. In the swirl of the music, in the way she held the beauty, it looked as if she didn't just despise her, but hated everything about her. Almost purposefully trying to twist the young woman's ankles in the way she swung her around.

Suddenly the music ended abruptly like it was written.

" **NO!"**

The old woman shrieked half-mad. It caused George to frighteningly put his hand on the last resort weapon in his pocket. The modest, wood paneled row house, ancient and prestigious, had fallen deathly silent in the tense moment. The other women looked amused by the sudden passion. But the musicians, who were already uncomfortable by the whole gig, looked down right terrified of the crone. Two of them were already out of their seats in alarm at the howl directed at them.

"Such … such passion."

The younger woman's sweetly accented voice was spoken with a tremble. She was dipped in the older woman's arms. Her vibrant red lips were in a tight and uneasy smile, but she was graciously diplomatic and malleable to the situation as she learned from her adopted mother, whose dress she was wearing. But the fear in her eyes was unmistakable.

"Mm …" The older woman sighed. "Yes, well … you'd know all about that by now, wouldn't you?" There was something strangely sadistic in her voice as she ran a shameless pearl gloved thumb over the girls red bottom lip. Then, with sudden disgust of the intimacy she nearly became lost in, she tossed the girl back up straight, nearly flinging her away like a used rag. The ringleader of the older women gave an annoyed, but polite sigh of endearment, as she turned to the musicians.

"Well played, gentlemen well played." She announced.

With just a nod of her head, the rest of the real life people fell in line, clapping graciously for the tormented maestros. The four men bowed and got up. They didn't need to be told that it was time to go. And there had never been a more grateful four people in the world to leave a house, which at one time, every socialite in New York would've killed to be invited too.

When they left, George retreated back up the stairs when a footman in Rococo garb paced toward the gaggle of women with glasses of silver. The lead Knickerbocker woman beckoned the younger woman toward them. She was all smiles and boundless energy, despite the rude treatment only moments before. They handed her a glass of liquid to which she took gratefully. They seemingly folded her into their group, surrounding her, pressing her tightly in their little circle.

When the footman was gone, George quietly descended the stairs. Back to the staircase wall, he peered around the corner. He was only a pre-teen boy, but even then, in the tight circle, the lip touching. He knew something was going on here …

"Such a fine gown."

"Yes, I, I quite like it myself. My mama says that there was not a finer wardrobe maker in the world than Worth. Though, he did die before I was born."

"He did, didn't he? Such youth amongst us, I hardly remember. Tell me, my sweet girl, which of these 'Mamas' are you referring too?"

"Yes, surely not the horrid one you told us about."

"No, not … not _mommy_. The other one, the one I choose to think of as my real mother."

"Oh good, of course, you're such a lucky girl. Not all of us got to choose our mothers. But if you hadn't chosen Cora, I'd hardly see why we'd bother with you in the first place …"

"Oh hush, Clarice, don't frighten her. She has only known charity in this house, haven't you my sweet cream drop?"

"Yes, you've all been so kind to me … and especially to _Atticus._ I'm forever in your debt."

"Nonsense, your husband is such a hard worker and it gives the young ladies such a treat when they come in for loans. It softens the blows, of course, when he has to deny them. If it wasn't for his _unfortunate_ background, I'd worry for you being able to keep him. But then we all know how you do that. Don't we?"

"Oh yes, I say we do … we do indeed, you _yummy_ girl."

"Speaking of which, I think it's time for the show, and how I'd hate to miss it."

"Mm … yes of course. You must go up my sweet and change."

"I … I think maybe I should call it an early night. We're enrolling my little girl in ballet classes in the morning, and I thought I'd go for a walk in Central Park with my son. Oh and my nephew was taking us to a football game. I'd really like to spend some time with him. He's so very clever and he really is all I have of home. I'm just really busy and have a full day tomorrow, please forgive me."

"Oh there's nothing to forgive, my girl, nothing at all. You go enjoy your time with your _half-breeds_ and that inbreeding _whore's_ son. I'll be sure to tell your husband tomorrow when I visit his boss, my husband, how much _pleasure_ your company has been these last months."

"No, please don't do that. I, I couldn't bare the way he'd look at me, that they'd all look at me, if you told him!"

"Darling, Darling, Darling dry your eyes. It was merrily just … a passing fancy. I didn't mean anything by it. Did I girls?"

"No …"

"Of course not."

"Never crossed my mind."

"See, you're jumping at nothing, my sweet girl. These things happen all the time. I'm sure if your 'Mama' was honest, which I know her never to be. She'd tell you all about her own pleasurable companions. But no worries, you go home and give those perfectly innocent children a kiss for us. Ladies? Nightcap?"

"Oh of course …"

"Would love one."

"No! … wait. I, I think, I can make the show, if you'd still want me."

"Oh darling! Girls' isn't that perfectly wonderful? Of course we want you. That would make tonight just a wonderful success. Now hurry and go ring for Willow, you must change at once."

"I won't be long."

"Take your time, we expect only perfection."

"I will."

"Oh and _Rose_?"

"Yes?"

"We all agreed on the harem costume tonight, the one with the slave collar."

"Absolutely."

When Rose parted company, George started moving up the stairs again. He didn't know what was going on, but he understood enough for his blood to get up for a fight. There was a terrible nastiness barely hidden underneath the complimentary words of those hags. They were a hard contrast from Lady Grantham, his granny, who had aged so gracefully and beautifully, it was hard to believe she was a contemporary with these horrid harpies.

He could hear the scraping of the train of the dress on the plush carpeting coming closer from the first landing as the boy flew back into the main hall of the home. Like everything else, the row house was modest and narrow, not leaving any room for extravagance. However, despite all of that, he did pause at a painting, hanging at the end of the hall.

It was of a fairy tale castle, shining white and pure at the break of the first morning light. Statues of mythological creatures guarded stain glass portraits of Arthurian Legend that was outlined in thorny rose trellises. It was a masterpiece … and it belonged to George. It was a painting that had been bought in a little Parisian gallery by Martha Levinson and had been hung in Cora's room since she was seven years old. George had sold it several years ago as a means of survival. He never thought in a million years that his Granny's painting, his painting, would hang in this awful woman's house like it was some hart's head in a hunter's lodge as a trophy. He was almost tempted to snatch it off the wall and take it home with him.

But suddenly he heard the shuffled footsteps on the stairs. From the corner, a large looming shadow was growing bigger and bigger on the far wall as someone slowly ascended the top of the stairs. Looking around he saw a broom closet and quickly absconded. He squeezed into the tight space, a feat that was only possible for an undersized pre-teen boy who inherited his mother's posture and physic. Keeping the door cracked open the shadow grew bigger and bigger. He could smell the, admittedly, delectable perfume that his Aunt Rose wore for special occasions before she even passed the closet door.

Quietly, he watched the woman, her head bowed in grief, her hand trailing against the wall. She looked like a condemned woman, or an abused little girl, sent up stairs to choose the belt that her parents were going to use to beat her with. The boy's heart clenched tightly in his chest and he was in physical pain when he saw his aunt stop at a door and laid her forehead against it. George knew she was crying, even when no sound was coming out of her.

It hurt him more than he could ever put into words.

It was a known fact that George was perpetually annoyed with his Aunt Rose. Sometimes he felt like her guardian. Having always been the trusted stop gap by Atticus, there to keep his lovely bride from doing something stupid in a foreign city. George had helped with Rachel and little Hugh as much as he could, and once or twice had to show their mother how to make a bottle or burp a baby. But for all of his annoyed looks when she'd come home and excitedly take his hand, leading him away from his task, to a couch where she'd immediately launch into the middle of a story … George loved her so dearly. And he'd not stand for anyone beholding a woman he loved to their whims and insults.

He just didn't know what they were beholding her too.

It was too much to bear. The boy couldn't sit there and watch her cry. With all of his soul screaming, he just wanted to hold her, kiss her, and tell her that he'd protect her from whatever was happening. It was an old instinct that a father's soul help create in conception and a burden that plagued a boy for years in the longing to love a cold mother who suffered so, even if she'd never admit. He didn't know if he really loved his Aunt Rose this much or if he only saw Lady Mary in the shadows of the house, but all he knew was that he wanted to protect her, to save her from this awful place and these awful people.

The closet door didn't move even an inch, before George halted. A faster moving figure swept up the stairs and paced toward Rose. It was a tall and frizzy haired black woman in a maid's outfit. In her hand was a hanger with a slinky blue silk sashed skirt with Arabic scrollwork. In her other was a thick, brown, leather strap that was too short to be a belt. George frowned in confusion as the woman greeted Rose at the door.

"Good evening, Miss Rose." There was a solemn and sympathetic courtesy in the maid's voice.

"Good evening, Willow." Rose tried to sound optimistic, giving her toothy grin, even as a tear fell.

"I know it ain't gonna help, but I think you're gonna look gorgeous tonight."

"Thank you." Rose smiled sadly and nodded as she followed the maid into the room and closed the door.

To what the show they were attending was George had no clue. It was awful late for a Broadway show, and the only movie theaters that ran at this time of night were the kind Atticus warned him away from. When his Aunt Rose asked why, he leaned over and whispered something in her ear. When he was done, his wife made an appalled face, but somehow giggled as well. But then both repeated together, with a united front, that George stay away from those places. So it was that the boy wasn't exactly sure what Rose was dressing for.

Suddenly, there was more commotion, much more, as the rest of the harpies came up the stairs. Cups in hand, chattering, giggling, they were clearly drunk. It wasn't the kind of keel over, vomiting; singing Irish independence songs as the cops escort you to the drunken cells, that George saw and loved to lightly take part in on Saint Patrick's Day on 34th and Main. It was the bad kinda drunk, the kind that makes you mean, makes you angry. It was the kind that inhibits dark behavior from dark thoughts of long vengeful musings. It was the kind of mindset that these women had lived in for many years, and were now visiting every fantasy within their power as the hardship of this Depression and the retaking of lost power decayed and warped the morals that once dictated their lives.

"The way I-, heard it, he came in to the bedroom and she was … talking to it!"

"Hahaha … no, she wasn't."

"Yes, there he was standing with nothing to cover himself but his hair, and she was in bed, talking to it. "Well, Little Lady Mary, what a wonderful day wasn't it?" And he just stared at her horrified. Here he is marrying this beautiful, rich, heiress, and he comes in there to squirt inside her, and she's talking to a dolly!"

HAHAHA!

"Ugh, that's why I hated her. It was so uncomfortable to be around her, especially with that "wittle gwirl boice." Just shoot me now."

"No refinement and always found joy in the most childish things. She used to even eat with her mouth open … remember?"

"Worse, she converse with the food in her mouth. If anyone was gonna marry that insipid, immature, brat, it was gonna be some Anglo, milk baby, who only washed his balls twice a week."

HAHAHA!

"Oh Cordelia, you're so awful."

"No, what was awful was that you know what? He still consummated the marriage after all that."

"Ewww … do you think her dolls watched?"

HAHAHA!

"Better, no, no, better yet … they named their daughter after the doll!"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

"Oh, poor thing, no wonder she married her cousin. And he killed himself!"

HAHAHAHAHA!

As one of the women closed the closet door, nearly falling over laughing at the expense of the people, the family, they all hated, she didn't bother to look inside. There she would've found a young man shaking to the brim with fury, a stuffed Great Dame in hand. George knew they were talking about his Granny and Donk, his mom and dad.

They were making up stories about them.

He didn't know till he got to New York just what people thought of the Crawley family. When Cora Levinson married, she was eighteen and in love. But the way they characterized her, some forty years later, she was a simpleton who still liked to play with her dolls and toys, and worse her Husband found that appealing in a wife while in their bedroom. George didn't know how mature or immature his Granny was the day she wed, but he thought of his Donk as nothing but the most honorable and generous men who ever lived. He would never find the thought of a little girl in his bed, appetizing, never. He didn't have a very high opinion of his mom, but George knew that she wasn't always the woman he remembered. There was a time when she might have loved him, because she loved his father. The dog in his hand was a testament to that love as much as the boy who clutched it. His father would never have killed himself to get away from his mother. George didn't know his father, but he knew that with his very soul …

Matthew Crawley loved Lady Mary, and no one could tell him any different.

But the worse of it all, was much like the painting, he knew the silver challis's they were drinking from. He knew the cleaner it was polished with, he knew the rusted ends from neglect, and he knew the crest on the sides of the cups. It was all familiar to him, because, they were a part of the set that he had sold the day he first encountered the women that were openly mocking his family, the way they had at the store where he sold them. It was his paintings, and now it was his silver that they were drinking from. And it wasn't that they needed it, that they envied it, or even admired it. It was bought out of spite, spite for forty years of losing a society war, forty years of Trans-Atlantic marriage, and bejeweled Countesses and Duchesses spending Christmases at their parent's mansions showing off in their furs and extravagance as if they were somehow royalty themselves. Now these bitter hags had waited, waited for the world to fall apart, before they'd make them pay. They'd take their swag, their memories, their history, and their adopted daughters, anything to exact their revenge for ruining their lives and prospects so many years ago.

The boy had enough. He couldn't stand it any longer and was going to leave. With all of his being, he wanted to knock those snotty old coots' wigs off and shove them down their envious throats. But he knew that he couldn't hit women, no matter how old they were. He wished he could at least leave with his Granny's painting. But he'd never get it out the window, and he wouldn't get far down the street before a beat cop would stop him. The best thing he could do was talk to his Aunt Rose when she got home.

All the women had gone into a separate room and he could hear their giggles. It only made him angrier, but he couldn't leave. Maids were going in and out, taking out their dresses and bringing nightwear. He wanted with all of his might to mock them for making fun of his Granny for playing with dolls, when they, old women themselves, were having a sleepover. But he was stuck in the broom closet while the traffic of maids, in different colored uniforms, wandered the hallway.

He was getting antsy when the traffic finally died down. The last maid was Willow who had his Granny's Worth gown in hand as she walked away. A fiery and sharp anxiety thumped George's heart faster to see her carry it away. First, it was the paintings. Then, it was the silver, and now Lady Grantham's prized dress?

That wasn't going to happen.

George exited the broom closet, quiet as a mouse. From the room where the ladies had gone in, there was the sudden seductive music of the wailing horn of an Egyptian snake charmer on vinyl. There was clinking of glasses and muffled chatter over it. He glared at the music, remembering something said to his Aunt Rose about harems. But he turned anyway and was about to pursue his Granny's prized gown when a door opened. Quickly he dashed to the shadows and crouched low.

Rose swept out of the other room slowly. Gone were his Granny's beautiful dress and the old world hair do. Rose's golden locks were now brushed out into curls and pinned in an elegant bun by a curving and gilded Arabian pin. A blue and gold robe, heavy and long, covered her taut body. One long perfect leg was exposed to the upper thigh each time she padded barefoot from the room. Around her pale and supple neck was a brown leather collar with an attachment at its base … for a chain. The woman didn't seem to notice her nephew in her moment of great torment as she paused outside the older women's door.

"Atticus, Rachel, Hugh, and George … Atticus, Rachel, Hugh, and George … Atticus, Rachel, Hugh, and George … Here I am!"

There was something truly upsetting hearing his name in the little mantra that his Aunt whispered to herself. She was frightened, resigned, and so filled with shame when she stood outside the door. Comfort had only come in the spoken words of the people she loved, in their names, in their faces. They were the only reason why she would do what she did. It was for their livelihood, for her desperate need to have them in her life, and for them not to shun her, that she allowed this to go on. They had tricked her into this, and now they had their foot on her very neck and that of her family's very existence. With all of that turmoil and sorrow, Rose entered the room with a fake enthusiasm and soft uneasy smile.

Suddenly the home got very quiet, the music stopped, and there were only muffled voices from behind the door. For a long pause, George stood in the middle of the hallway. He had heard his name on the lips of a desperate woman he loved, he was the reason that she was doing something she didn't want too. She was protecting him from something, she was afraid he wouldn't love her anymore if he knew what it was.

There are moments in time in which we go back and wonder why we did what we had done. Ponder how life would've been different if we hadn't done something, gone left instead of right on the forked road of destiny. Lady Mary Crawley was plagued with nightmares of screaming, begging, and pleading with a woman in a silk nightgown not to do it, as she stared at a small child standing at the top of Downton's grand staircase on a fateful Christmas Eve morning. Lady Edith wondered if her child would've suffered so much at the hands of aristocratic bullies, wondered if she'd been able to give Marigold and George a good home in her flat in London, if only she had told George the truth about Mary's efforts to find him. All of these blunders led to this one moment of time.

Fore George Crawley didn't need to wonder, he knew, what would've happened if he had gone chasing after the maid with his Granny's prized Worth gown that night … instead of going to see what was happening in the room Rose entered.

* * *

 _ **Now**_

A dark and violent obscurity felled the soft glint and sparkle of starlight that broke the canopies of the shadowed and twisting forest below. Heavy and thick did the suffocation fall over the night that it brought with it a new layer of dark to this ponderous witching hour. It was a pitch that made visibility almost non-existent through the tangle of ivy, root, and brush. All of which had become cloaked in an unearthly mist that swirled such fantastically frightening figures that was shaped by the anxiety of the mind within the dancing shadow of the foreboding eclipse. And in the distance was the low rumbling of a beastly opponent that lay on the horizon. The wind creaking and snapping branches as this great dragon sucked in his mighty breath to announce his coming. It came with a bright flash that tore through the pitch darkness and lit the world in an explosion of light that was so bright and sudden that it could blind a man. Next, there was the roar, loud and powerful. The ground trembled in its rage, before there was nothing but stillness in the charged air.

A storm was coming.

The animal and insect noise fell silent in the thunder clap that startled the dark misty tomes of the late summer evening. For a long moment a man waited for it to return before he moved, but it didn't. All life, all movement, and time itself had halted. There was no wind in the wild, unkept, woodland around him. There was a great and foreboding pause in the air, a dastardly anticipation from the depths of hell itself, as figures danced in the mist and leaves rustled. With each noise his breath caught and he turned his Lugar pistol and pointed at the illusions that he felt would jump out at him at any moment. He was supposed to be of a superior race, superior breeding, and nothing had ever made him question such a known fact more than at this very moment.

He had tasted combat before, but it was in the air, where he belonged. He was no infantryman, and he was not a real soldier. The man was a tail gunner for a bomber, the easiest, and yet most important job in the Reich. He was given all the glory for what seemed to be a menial job in the whole Luftwaffe. He had no kills to his credit, and he had been through so many missions in France already that the young man had thought nothing of the bombing run they had been sent on this morning. But what had happened that afternoon, what he had seen, he never imagined there could be anything in the world as terrifying or as horrible as the fight the RAF had given them. It was a true shock, a horrible reality check that had come too late.

They had bombed London before, knocking down a _rich neighborhood of high class homes._ But all that felt like was vandalism. They were told that it was a symbol of pride, to make suffer those who thought themselves so superior, all the gold in the world could not make up for their lack of breeding. There was only one true aristocracy … only one Master Race. He had woken up this morning and thought that a day light run on a little country factory would be easier than their raids on London. But now he was constantly on edge, and half traumatized by the day's events. When he closed his eyes he could still see the planes firing into one another at point blank range, explosions of unbearable heat rocking around him, feet from his station, and the terrible screeching of planes crashing head first into one another. Today had been nothing but a meat grinding blood bath, a vicious and awful meandering fistfight that no pilot or gunner signed up for upon enlistment. Now, in a day when he saw his crewmate's burn alive when one of their own ME 109's cashed into their belly. Felt the fear of parachuting through the high speed chaos as shell, explosion, and death clamored around his helplessly floating form. After all that, he was here, sent into the woods to find the figure that had shot at their pack of survivors.

He had never been in a land that had felt so foreign to him in his entire life. The French countryside was beautiful. The forests of the Deutschland were ancient, but tall and stately. But here in the rural country of England, there was something elemental and haunted in the vast grey moors and dark woodlands that surrounded the provincial villages and outlying counties of this Island. It was a cold and damp place that felt like another world entirely and in the rumble of the coming storm, never more did the Nazi gunner feel like an unwanted intruder.

With each step in the stillness, it might as well have been the echoing clacks of boots on marble. His shaky breath and the shutter of folding foliage in his movement seemed to give away his position. He looked back as he strode forward, back to where he came from, and realized that he had pursued their enemy too far into the woods. This wasn't like the farmer that they had come upon. A swine herder in his big stone house, warn out from putting out the fires on his barn. He had felt guilty about taking the clothing, but there was no choice. They simply couldn't be wandering around in their uniforms and flight gear. They would have to find a place to hide till the Fuhrer could invade England. And there was only one place big enough for all of them …

This man had it in his head that he was chasing rustics, farmers with pitchforks. It was all they would have to contend with that night. But even as he stepped quietly, a pair of eyes watched inches from his feet from a depression in the floor of the forest. They were calm, cold, and darkly vengeful as they waited for the right moment.

The wind kicked up again, blowing away the obscurity from the trees and brush of the forest, clearing the mist from the area. The German's sweaty brow was wiped away by the handkerchief that belonged in the breast pocket. Shakily, he knew that he would only get lost if he chased anymore pig farmers into the wood. There was no big risk in taking advantage of the clearing to return to the road where the others waited.

Anxiously shoving a dead farmer's cloth inside the breast pocket of his stolen shirt, the Nazi Gunner turned to make his way backward. Suddenly, his heart stopped, and a prickle went up his spine. Never had his scalp been more on fire with itch as that very moment. Fore as he turned he bumped into someone's chest. With a loud and strangled gasp, the gunner fell to the floor and looked up to see a tall man shadowed in the darkness, standing at full height. He wore a worn double breasted leather coat with the collar done up, supple leather boots, and an old, wrapped and folded, scarf that fluttered in the wind. In his hand was a revolver.

Though the German carried a Luger, he was no soldier, and he could not even comprehend defending himself in such a frightened state. The only thing that went through his mind as the man lifted the barrel to point between his eyes was how suddenly guilty he felt about burning all those books. His grandfather was a librarian in Munich. He would've shunned such behavior to the very item that paid for his father and his own education. As a bolt of lightning cut through the dark pitch of the old forest, the light glinting off the gun barrel and the glass lens of the younger man's goggles around his neck, the RAF Ace pulled his trigger.

There was a clap of thunder that echoed through the forest before Mother Nature answered the delay with her own roar.

The knee deep fog seemed to be whipped up into a frenzy of strange and ominous shapes as it swirled around the tree line of the forest road. The thick, almost viscous, clouds seemed to glow in the electricity of the stormy atmosphere. The mysterious and unknown only enhanced the feelings of dread at the foreign surroundings of the party of Nazi survivors that stood in the middle of the dirt road. They had been given free reign of the countryside, while the denizens of the County Grantham fled to their shelters for the night. The war had seemed so far away from all of this peaceful country life, but when the alarm sounded, not a soul stood out in the open for hundreds of miles. Frightened of the terror and horror of the London bombings in the south, the people of Grantham County took no chances. So as it were the survivors of the raiding party had not seen a soul, not since the pig farm with the burned out barn.

The fight that afternoon had made them edgy, and the storm only worsened their mood. Rain meant no bombings, no operations, which meant more time they were stranded in enemy territory. For months they had all the faith in the world that England could be invaded successfully. But now they were not been so sure. After watching their squadron torn to scrap heaps by the ultra-aggressive RAF defending the rural county, and the heavy losses being taken every day for a costly war for dominance over the English airspace, it seemed less and less likely. And if there was no invasion, then there was no rescue …

And that made them very desperate men.

It had been over ten minutes since they had finally found a road. But their reward was to see two of their own cut down in an ambush. They were saved by the fact that one of the men had taken a shotgun from the farmer's house. The double barreled weapon had driven the solitary figure into the woods. They had sent one of their group members after him, and he was yet to come back.

The shotgun man in the squad of stranded Luftwaffe members had laid aside his stolen weapon and was tending his wounded friend next to him. He laughed mirthfully in his pain, as not only was he unarmed, but was just a navigator on the bomber. He didn't even know how to fire a gun. As the two men shared a cigarette, they lamented about their bad luck all around. The rest were hardly paying attention, looking down the road each way, quietly debating which way they should travel, a little more confident in their new clothing. As the embers of the night's last cigarette lit the shadowy reflection of dark eyes, the navigator looked up to see a silhouette moving in the swirling mists. His movements were just being made out in the contrast of the blue glow of the foggy moors and the flash of lightning in the distance.

Blowing out a long draft of smoke, he chuckled good naturedly at the stalking figure slowly approaching. He was glad to see that his friend hadn't gotten lost. He handed the shotgun man the lit smoke and sat a little straighter.

„Ach, haben Sie die Schweinehalter ? Eh?" The man called out with a chuckle.

Suddenly there was another flash of lightning that struck close by. The delay was short as thunder pounded the quiet with a violent boom that shook the ground. When the wounded navigator removed his shielded hand from the bright light, his comrade was gone. He was about to call for him when he felt a wet trickle fall down on the bridge of his nose.

„Verdammt, hier kommt der regen, nicht wahr?" He spoke conversationally to his caretaker, wiping away the liquid falling on his nose and brow.

But then he paused.

The liquid didn't feel like water. It was hot, too hot for such a cold and damp night. It stuck to his fingers and his skin all wrong. He questioned himself before he looked up. It was just in time to see the shotgun man have a stricken look of complete shock on a terrifying face of frozen surprise. There was a bloody and gruesome hole that had cratered in the dead center of his forehead. Limply, the gunner fell over the navigator, burying him underneath his dead weight.

The navigator let out a mournful and alarmed cry that caught the rest of the Nazi group's attention. There was another clap of thunder, this time accompanied by no great blast of lightning, just a muzzle flash from a Luger pistol. Two holes made sickening thunks through a Bomber Captain's chest. He hit the floor as a shadow moved through the tree line. Matching pistols opened fire at the dancing shadow and twisting shapes of the misty forest. Exploding bark and whizzing bullets chased after the allusively dashing figure that darted from tree to tree.

Suddenly there was another booming shake of the earth, like the sound of an artillery shell impacting the ground close by. The gunfire increased, as if the thunderhead only incensed the Nazis. The rolling sound of the firefight, echoed through the village of Downton and Great Estate, like a fireworks show during a thunder storm. It was a uniquely terrifying sound that would never be forgotten by all those who heard it.

Suddenly a voice cried out in echoing alarm over the noise.

„Auf der rechten Seite , auf der rechten Seite!"

Immediately, the Luftwaffe gunners, pilots, and captains began firing to the trees and bushes to their right. In their distraction an obscured shadow from their left spun out from behind a tree and fired a shot from his Colt revolver right into the side of an escort pilot he had already wounded once that day. In his other hand he fired at the group with the captured Luger. Using duel weapons in each hand, one of which that fired a rifle cartridge, the Nazis were outgunned. Surprised, and outmatched, not having experience fighting and hunting slave trading Bedouin bandits through the Sinai, the remaining four men fled back the other way into the forest and disappeared into the mist.

From underneath his friend, the navigator looked on at the pile of dead bodies that now lay in the middle of the road. His eyes were wide and his side was on fire as he tried to crawl out from under the dead weight that had him pinned. The loaded shotgun was only a few drags away. In the distance the figure that had shot him and outwitted his comrades, came sweeping out of the fog and shadows. He heard moaning at the same time as the victorious gunfighter. In the distance he saw his own captain shakily lifting his pistol at the figure pacing toward the middle of the road. He wanted to scream for the man not to do it. But it was too late. The wounded bomber captain was riddled by the rest of the captured Luger's clip. He died with the Nazi oath on his lips. The navigator thought that Herr Hitler would be pleased, but somehow that didn't bring him any comfort.

Watching the RAF Ace look at the Luger in pure loathing, as if he was carrying a woman's soiled knickers, the man toss the empty weapon at the pile of dead bodies and wiped his hand off on his pants in disgust. Fearing that he would suffer the same fate, the Navigator pushed hard to try and reach the shotgun. He could almost feel the cold metal on the tip of his finger when great and terrible pain shot through his hand. He heard his knuckles crackle under the pressure of a boot that casually stepped on his outstretched hand. He let out a howl of pain as the man bent down and picked up the shotgun.

"Where did you learn to speak German?"

Matthew Crawley looked pale as a linen sheet as he stepped out of the woods and back on the road hauling the parachute pack. It seemed like a strange rebuttal to everything when there were more important questions to ask. Such as where his boy learned to do all of what he just witnessed? Matthew grieved to admit that he had killed men himself. He wasn't so sure how many, he never counted. He had never been a very good shot, but when you storm a trench, aiming was hardly necessary in the blanket of struggling bodies.

But there was experience and a frighteningly cold efficiency in the way that George had done away with half of their antagonists. He had lured them in the forest, set traps, and used clever tricks of light, sound, and language to catch them unawares. He had wanted to ask him all sorts of questions about it, but then he wandered back to the question of the Pinkerton's, Bounty Hunters after Ottoman gold, Nazi Storm-troopers in the Holy Land, and Arab bandits in the Sinai, all of which invoked that same look in his eye. Suddenly, Matthew found that he didn't want to know. If he did, it might destroy him to realize that he was never there to protect him from all of those that wanted his boy dead, nor that he was not there to teach the gunfighter an alternative way to such violence.

George popped open the hutting shotgun to check the shells. Underfoot, the wounded German wailed and sobbed, pushing on George's ankle and pounding on the ground, trying to get the younger man's foot off his hand. To the question the young ace snapped the barrel shut.

"Cairo … there was a ton of Nazi cronies slithering around the place looking for ancient artifacts for Hitler's occult fetish. The city was shit gutter full of German diplomatic dignitaries, scientists, expeditionary soldiers, SS agents, and their pet Arabs in the bazaars and back alleys. You either brush up on your Kraut, or risk some son of a bitch with Aryan sympathies plotting behind your back, while … standing … right in front of … you."

Suddenly the young man became distracted by the shotgun in his hand. Matthew frowned as he stepped closer, the sobbed pain of the navigator ignored in curiosity. The confusion was slowly giving way to something else. Inside of him was something angry, something dark, and utterly terrifying that exploded behind dark blue eyes. In his hand was a handsomely crafted weapon that was a prize possession of a family. It had been a thank you to loyal tenant farmers after a century of hard work and partnership of an estate that no longer exists. They had moved away to a new estate, worked hard to maintain it. And even though the name that lay finely engraved on the shotgun is nothing but the taken name of a seven hour bride that inherited it, George still knew who it belonged too.

"You goddamn Aryan bastard ..." George said harshly under breath. A fire was lit behind eyes that stared at the engraved name.

He was a small boy again, sitting on the stool in the kitchens of a great house. He couldn't be sure why, but there was something satisfactory in the way food was always made there. Something about the sound of chopping on the board, the way the custard looked as it was mixed in the bowl. And, of course, the white noise of chattering gossip. He'd place his little head on his tiny hands and watch them work, watch her work. She didn't say anything, always a frightened soul, afraid of stepping on someone's shadow. They never had really anything to say to one another. But there were times when she'd look up from her work, from the mixing and chopping. She'd find him there at the kitchen island. The girl would wipe her wrist against her sweaty brow and catch his eye. Little George knew nothing but a smile that was always meant for him. With a playful look around, she'd sneak him a slice of apple from that night's pudding, and then with a giggle, go on with her work. It wasn't much, but for George, even all these years later …

It was enough.

"You son of a bitch …" He was still staring at the gun. But soon enough he turned toward the Nazi crewman that lay on the ground. "You killed her!" He snarled with hatred.

"George!"

He threw the shotgun down and murderously descended on the man, his hands grabbing the navigator by his pale throat. The man could only protest with a gruesome squeaky gag. With one hand, gripping the younger pilot's forearm of beaten leather, he weakly fought the strangulation, while George began throttling him. Matthew immediately leapt forward and restrained his son as he began slamming the balding man's head against the road.

"He killed her!"

George struggled out of his father's grip and walked away for a moment, putting his hands on his head as if overwhelmed. He was in complete loss of sense of anything but hatred and violence. In the background the wounded man coughed, while cradling his broken hand. Matthew in all of his life had never seen such a black hatred infect someone so fast and so passionately. He took a hard breath from a heaving chest of anxiety and approached him.

"What is all of this?" He asked. "What's happened …?"

Suddenly George grabbed Matthew by the lapels and gave him a violent shake. "Shut up!" He shouted in his face. "Don't say another goddamn word." He shook him again, with the lowest growl of a rabid wolf with his prey in sight. He pushed him away violently. The youth seemed half driven in grief and the other in a rage of boiling blood too fresh from all the fighting of the day. It was a sort of madness born of war, the human condition pushed to the breaking point before the animal is unleashed.

And when that happens, God help the man who comes across the most ravenous and merciless of beasts on this good earth.

When Matthew regained his balance, the pilot was pacing back and forth, like a wild animal. His cold, hateful eyes were watching the balding, middle aged, man who had curled up in a fetal ball as his only means of defense. It made the soldier almost pity the man, even though he knew he shouldn't.

Matthew wasn't a soldier, he was a leader, he was reliable, and he could get the job done. But he was no killer, and he knew nothing of pursuing vengeance. His brain did not work the way other men of war did. He did not hate the man shooting at him, for he had as much duty to his country's cause as Matthew did. It was unfortunate, but a hard choice that he lived with when he pulled the trigger. But even now he knew that his boy was not this way without a reason, no matter what he might have thought of him at this very moment. He was a young man as wild and dangerous as a hungry tiger behind a rickety cage of rusted metal.

As the young man paced back and forth being torn apart by the darkest of vengeful intentions, working himself into a dark fury, Matthew walked over to the tossed over weapon that had caused all of this. It was not unfamiliar to the man on closer inspection. He knew he had seen it before, if not in person, than certainly by description in the mind's eye in the long nights in the trenches. The man slowly closed his eyes at the name he saw engraved. It was hard, but as George walked back toward the cowering navigator, Matthew Crawley couldn't find one reason to stop him this time. All because of the name that he owed so much too, that both he and his beloved Mary owed every bit of their happiness and love. A name revered by all upstairs and Downstairs of Downton even after his death.

 _ **MASON**_

George kicked the navigator over, aiming for his wounded side. The balding man convulsed in pain as he fell flat on his back. The hateful youth dropped his knee on the man's side causing him to scream. There was a glint of pure sadism as the vengeful pilot suddenly punched the man in the below the eye. "Shut up!" He roared at him. He drew his revolver and shoved it into the man's bruised cheekbone.

"Did you kill her?" He demanded viciously.

„Bitte, ich bin ein Kriegsgefangener, können Sie das nicht tun!"

To the man's begging, George pistol whipped him hard. "Answer me! Did you kill her?!" He buried his revolver into the Nazi's temple and drew the hammer back.

„ch bin nur ein Navigator , ich habe keine Waffen abfeuern ..."

"Alright, we'll play it your way." Matthew clutched the Mason family heirloom as George pushed the hammer forward on his weapon and holstered it. He didn't even think when he rushed forward when saw the glint of Damascus steel and Ruby.

"George!" He called in alarmed shock rather than reproach.

The Nazi began to struggle when his captor unsheathed the ornate blade from inside his boot. With his free hand he punched the man so hard that he bounced his head against the dirt. The middle aged man was dazed when George cruelly pinched the man's nose shut, nearly ripping it off with the force in which he grabbed it. When the Nazi finally gasped for air, George forced him to keep his mouth open as he angled the knife under his right molar.

"You want to chew your food again or do you want it with a straw, asshole?" He snarled with a gravely darkness.

"Naw, bittche … AWWW!"

The tooth came out with a bloody squirt. There was no emotion on the pilot's face has he moved to the next tooth, working his way in. "Her name was Daisy!" He was frigid now. "She was the Assistant Cook for years. She never harmed a soul. And you and your buddies killed her, didn't you? **Didn't you?!** " He flicked his wrist.

"AWWW!"

"Say her name you murdering son of a bitch!"

"George, stop this, for the love of god!" Matthew pleaded with his entire soul.

He did not recognize the young man who rounded back to him. "For the love of God? For the love of God?! Do you know who he is?!" He asked. "If you did, you wouldn't dare put the two together!"

"He murdered Daisy, I … I know." He was petrified of the son he didn't know at all.

George hooked the razor sharp blade into the man's cheek. "He's a Navigator with the 69th Blitz Squadron outta of the 103rd Bombing Group." He turned back to his father with the darkest look any man had ever given the soldier. It was a darkness that not many men could stand to be in the presence of. "They target urban areas. They don't bomb military targets, they bomb _civilians_ , innocent people!" His jaw was screwed tight in his rage. "This coward's killed more children in four months than influenza has in three _fucking_ years!" He gritted his teeth and his arm tensed as if he was going to cut him from lip to ear.

"But you're not him, my dear chap! Please, _George_ , you're not him …"

Suddenly thunder roared and lightening flashed. And in the stranger's voice he saw the dancing couple. And in the hewed light of the flashing of clouds above, he remembered so vividly how Downton had been lit on the coldest of darkest nights. The fine man and the beautiful woman in a ripple of time and space, a memory he shouldn't have. It was in the stillness of his companion's voice, the care, the love in such a desperate moment that he so suddenly clung too. It was not only the love shown to him, but the endlessness of the devotion that the dancing couple had for one another that gave him pause. Seeing the two of them together in the flash, in the quiet desperation of the voice that called to him now, all of it was what George needed to regained who he was, who he really was. All before crossing a line he couldn't come back from. It was in the sight of the intertwining of the very souls of the star-crossed lovers union that created him, which he fought off such darkness that would've forever dominated his future.

When the flash of light reseeded, a low rumble of thunder underplayed the small thuds and prickling sounds of droplets that pelted the green foliage hidden in fog. Then, in a downpour, heavy rain fell to the earth and dosed the three men. The sound of water running off Matthew's tin helmet fell on his boots while he held his breath in the tense moment. Blood was mixing with the water that filled the German's mouth. His grey eyes were dazed and tears mixed with rain as he locked eyes with a shocked youth who was staring at the bloody mess he had made as if for the first time.

Slowly George looked over at the knife that was wet with water and blood. His hand was shaking as he stared at it in shock. His eyes were wide and disbelieving. He had almost done it. George Crawley had almost murdered a man. In his fury, in his righteous rage, he had almost made the same mistake he had made all those years ago in New York. He had ruined so many lives that day, and the woman he had saved, a woman he loved, she never looked at him the same way ever again.

The ordinate blade hit the muddying road with a soft thunk when he let it slip from his grip. George's hand still shook as he reached down and grabbed the German officer's stolen shirt and twisted it in his hand. He still hated him with all of his being, but he couldn't find the strength, not right now, not anymore.

"I'm not going to kill you." His voice shook with hatred. "You're gonna live to see the end of this day …" His vice grip was hard iron but was in restraint as the rain fall washed his rugged face clean. "And you're gonna remember it!" He gave him one last hard shake. Bringing the older man eye level to him, his hot breath stung the Nazi's face. "Someday you're gonna die. And when you're burning in Hell, you're gonna remember me … remember **her** , forever!" He promised with a violent voice behind gritted teeth before he threw the man back down into the mud.

Slowly the pilot stood, picking up his knife. There was a long moment, with blade at the ready, while he gazed at the Navigator. The Nazi coughed and sobbed in a quieted low whimper, as gooey blood, saliva, and rain water spilled from his open mouth into the mud when he turned over on his side. Half of his face was buried in the muck as he curled in a rain soaked ball and sobbed pathetically.

Sheathing his smoky metal blade, the youth turned to the tin hatted man that stood off to the side. There was a mingling of relief, concern, and fear on his pallid features when Matthew joined his gaze to his son's. But as the rain ran off the brim of his tin hat like a water fall, George could see that it was the understanding in crystalline eyes that gave the youth pause. There was a patient bias, and so much understanding that was in the man's eyes. And in that moment, at George's darkest moment, when he turned and found only unconditional love for the stranger, that it came to him.

He knew who he was, and if he didn't know, he was coming to an understanding of who his companion might be. It had him at a loss as to how it was possible, if it was possible, and if there was something wrong with his mental state. The soldier was the man from the vision, **is** the man from the vision. He didn't know his name, why he was here, how it was possible, and why he was standing in front of him. George only knew that he was grateful that he was …

That for once somebody had been there to stop him.

Seeing the recognition or the semblance of a growing one, there was hope in the man's body language when he reached out through the rain to touch his son's shoulder. It was what he had been hoping for all this time. Just one moment, in which they were equals. A time when the man could tell the boy, his boy, all the things he wanted to say, should say, and should've been said all the long years he had been gone.

But Matthew was slightly crestfallen, however, when George flinched away from his touch. It was somewhere between disbelief in what he saw right in front of him and the fear of the blood up and the fight still burning through him. If he thought he was going crazy or was not feeling kindly, frightened and edgy with so much gunpowder left inside to be shot off before the night was over, either way, he had no opinion of who he knew was right in front of him.

"Let's move …"

George took the Masons' shotgun from out of his father's hands. Slowly, they turned, and began trekking through the downpour toward Downton. Their disappearance in the fog was scored by the rippling and rustling of plants and tree leaves being struck by rainfall. And while a wounded and bloodied man guiltily sobbed in the mud …

The thunder rolled.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements & Inspirations**

" _It's A Long Road" – Jerry Goldsmith & Dan Hill (First Blood)_

" _The Thunder Rolls" – Garth Brooks_

" _The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" – Reba McEntire_


	11. The Summer Before the War

**The Summer Before The War**

The storm came in waves, vicious and violent as a mad man's moods on the moonless summer night. The last heat of the season, of the year, was broken in the sudden torrent that cleansed the countryside of the unnatural fear and hopelessness of a kingdom, the last kingdom. It was as if the anticipation, the desperate prayers for overcast, rain, and murky weather was put off and put off, like a midnight promise disregarded in the afternoon chimes of church bells. Like a dam holding back a great river of salvation, was such blessed relief contained. Withheld till all those trapped in bunkers, and wandering the burning streets, covered in ash, looking for scraps, called out to the heavens in one voice. Screaming, begging, and crying for God to bring on the deluge. And now, the whole island huddled in the dark, bereft of feeling to the normality in the terror of the fruits of nightfall that brought only death. Only then did the stones and rocks come tumbling down and the wrath of heaven, of everything that they had been hoping for, came flowing from the dark sky. Sheets and sheets of water muddied roads and flooded open basins. The wind ripped away loose sheets of paper, and blew away hanging signs in front of shops. It seemed that all the anger, frustrations, and hate of an entire nation after four months of death and suffering was reflected in the violent booms and brilliant flashes that exploded over the open moors and wild unkept forests of the county.

When it was over, the world had gone still once more. After all the noise and savagery, it left a charge in the air in its passing. There were no animals sounds, no chirping of insects, or the lonesome whistle of a midnight train passing through. The world had gone silent, the reverberation and echo of the wrath of God still ringing in this earthly plain's ears. In the moment's reprieve, there was a great and awesome show of light. In the darkness, tall towers of thick rich clouds were outlined in awesome flashes of patterns that lit the passing and oncoming thunderheads in the distance.

Surrounded on all sides of this wondrous and divine power was the truth shown in the reflection of violent light that fell on the anachronistic village, trapped in the very eye of this thunderous duel of colliding storms.

The rotted reek of trellis flower, ivy, and mold whiffed through the night, assailing the nostrils with the smell of neglect and decay. The snapping and popping of setting stone, wood, and tin in the change of temperature was like the creaking and cracking of an old grand lady's aged joints. Dressed in her drab, molting, finery, she longs for the days of bounty and dreams of a youth long passed, never to come again. Weeds crept through the cobbled stone streets. The grass in the once lush parks was wild and overgrown. Ivy and vine, once an aesthetic choice for architecture, now dominated and covered the mossy stoned buildings. They wrapped and warped fence and homes, snaking their way into every nook and cranny. Buildings once baring great distinction, now were abandoned, and in disrepair. On the cobble walkways and main drags, there were assortments of missing roofs, broken windows, and crumbling stone. The abandoned businesses and homes hung open like a festered boil on a rotting wound. The very ghosts of past grandeur were felt in the chilled atmosphere of sorrow that was wedded to the very sight of this failing way of life. It had been a time and place that had conceived and birthed this very corpse that now rotted in the forgotten pages of crumbling texts. A story finished in Edwardian ballrooms and began on tapestries woven for shining Knights of chivalrous romance.

And ever in the distance, was the custodian of this graveyard of all the glories of yesterday. Once, it had been known as a grand and sweeping country estate of beauty, envied by all. Now its shadow looms over the dead like the dreaded haunted castle of a long cursed land. Backlit by the quiet flashing light of dueling elemental storms in the distance, it was a haunted gloom of sorrow and blasphemies that lies within its distinctive shadowed silhouette. For there, on the distant hilltop, lays Downton Abbey.

A haunted and forgotten palace, lost to time and the darkest of despair.

In the distance was the rhythmic tapping of a wooden business sign over an abandoned shop as draining water pushed it back and forth. It was the only thing that could be heard in the stormy night as two figures emerged from the thick fog. They stood at the very entrance of the old village observing the sight that both men's past and future had a hand in, and yet had spent most of their lives away from.

It was the very ruins of the kingdom that they were supposed to inherit.

There was a horrible sorrow in the way that Matthew Crawley removed his tin hat. There was something mournful and shocked in the way he slowly slid it from his head, as if he was standing in front of a newly discovered tombstone of an old lover. His crystal eyes were one part horrified, one part heartbroken. His knees shook and it seemed that it took everything he had not to fall to them. He was devastated in the sight of the ruined village and the sinister silhouette of the great house that climbed above it.

This was not the Downton that he had left, the Downton that he had given his life to save, and the Downton that had provided him with everything that he could've ever dreamt of having in his lonely life. Gone was the whimsical charm, and wholesome salt of the country life that was a treasure. It was unrecognizable. There was a deep nostalgic sadness that fell over him as he saw the vine wrapped and creaking rusted signs that he had once known so well, only to find most of them were dusty and shuttered. The many walks taken hand and hand through the park with his wife and her sisters, his friends, to fairs and carnivals was now overgrown. A mostly dead tree with bare branches stood next to a stained and side leaning white pavilion tent left from long ago.

The green, the very color of the enchanted atmosphere of the small village had been stolen away. And in his heart he felt as if the very place he had fell in love and won the heart of his country princess was all but a wisp of memory, gone forever. His ship had lost its anchor, lost its context. The vibrancy of such strong feelings of hardship, work, and patience wed to the sweetness of love, understanding, and contentment was all lost now, forgotten. In the places where he had courted and loved his Mary in there youth, was no more or were nearly unrecognizable in their neglect.

"What … what happened?"

Matthew couldn't hide the sudden emotion in his shaky voice as he wiped red and watery eyes with a uniformed sleeve of wet wool. It was as if the very memories, the very existence of that love were ripped away from him. It had outlived its time and was dated to obscurity.

"What do you mean what happened? Time, time happened. People grow up, move on. Most people don't think living, working, and dying in a place like Downton is heaven on earth, you know."

George Crawley didn't seem to notice his father's emotions. He stood and looked around at the ghost town flooded in rolling mist that obscured vine wrapped ruins of days that he had no memories or fondness for. When he looked over the crumbling stone and brittle windows that nature was slowly reclaiming year after year, he felt the old demons of helplessness that had plagued him for most of his life. He remembered a cold Christmas morning seared into his soul, and a night much like this one when he last laid eyes on these ruins. That was his legacy, his responsibility. To look after a graveyard of terrible memories and a dead way of life, to bask in the glories and nostalgia of people and places he never knew. To take pride in the ruins for what they had once been, long before he was ever born. All he saw in this place was death, death of people centuries before and the death of his own past.

And yet, even in the shadows of his old rebellion, there was something nostalgic in his very blood. He may have been mostly American, but he couldn't shake the attachments. He accepted somewhere deep inside that he wouldn't be here without all of this. That even in his anger at the situation he was born into, he couldn't deny the sorrow in his soul of the tragedy all around him.

"Years ago, they temporarily shuttered the factories down in Ripon several months after the Stock Market fell in New York. Business was bad for the auto-shop that Uncle Tom and Mom were running, they had to cut back on the orders, and well that meant that the car plant had to cut back on workers. The Labor Government … the Socialists and Communists, at any rate, drummed up a lot of anger for the bi-elections. They got the workers drunk first, then, they got'em pissed. They vilified Donk, and especially Uncle Tom, called him a … well an 'Uncle Tom' for the Aristocracy. Afterward they bused in angry workers from other counties and they rioted in the village. Burnt down the shop, and destroyed anything they could get their hands on with "Grantham" on it. Uncle Tom had tried to go down there and talk to them, and they put him in St. Johns for two months. They destroyed most of the village by the time any authorities got here. When it was over, Parliament said that it was up to the Estate to rebuild, but without the car business … well it was either the house or the village. And Donk was out voted."

George explained, his voice echoing down the empty streets as they entered their shared empty domain. Matthew slowly put his helmet on and bowed his head as he saw the old scorch marks and broken whiskey bottles in the alleys and crooks of broken stone. His only frame of reference was the violence at the bi-elections before the war … his war, at any rate. He remembered the ruffians that had descended upon the counting, reeking of whiskey and trouble. He had come to rescue Sybil from the chaos. He wasn't a violent man, but he could never control his impulses when it came to protecting Sybil and Tom.

Matthew had been an only child, and quite friendless for much of his life to that point. And he found that where he and Mary had gotten off to a bad foot, Sybil had done much to bridge the gap in the rift by doing all she could to include him in the family. It didn't take long for Matthew to become very protective of her. She sometimes could ever be found underfoot, her envy of him having a job and her consistent visits to his work with Tom, Made Sybil seem as much his baby sister, as she was to Mary and Edith. Whither it was hiding from her Governess, or to accompany him on his lunch break just so she could ask his secretary questions. Soon, what had been a novel and sandwich for most of his life was now a pub on Fridays, Pleasure trips on Saturdays, and dinners at Crawley House on Sundays with Sybil and even sometimes Tom. Even during the war, even after they were all married, and when Sybil was gone, they never missed those weekends together. It was in those memories of his new family, of his best friends that caused him to punch that man who accosted Sybil, who shoved down Tom. And it was why he could only feel anxiety and terror at the thought of dozens of that kind vandalizing the village, all the places that had meant so much to him, to all of them.

"What did you do?" He asked George, suddenly frightened for a boy he wanted to know so badly.

The pilot shrugged. "I was away at the time, in San Sochi on Fifth Avenue's "Mansion Graveyard". Aunt Edith told me about it a year later, and then I read about it in the Sentinel … Richard Carlisle, the old 'Robber Baron', didn't seem too sympathetic in his editorial." There was a shared bitterness in the matching looks that both men gave at the mention of the Hawker Newsman. Matthew's fist still pulsed from the last time he saw him in the smaller library in Downton. Even just the mention of the man, even after all the decades later, still got his blood up.

Each storefront, whether shuttered for the night or forever, carried with it memories, times and places Matthew Crawley could never get back. All of it led him to think of her, to think of his wife. How he longed to be with her, to touch her. But he knew that she was not why he was here. But more over he was afraid to look upon her, to see her, and know that the woman he loved was not herself. The decay of this once magical kingdom that they were to be the king and queen of someday seemed almost indicative of the way he knew all the people he had once known and loved would be. They'd be familiar strangers after twenty years. Changed, and some, not for the better. Matthew could not bear to see what has happened to Mary, his Mary. Not this malevolent queen, cold, beautiful, and sharp, that George had only known and fought so bitterly against for most of his life.

"Here we go …"

They stopped in front of a very familiar shop that made Matthew immediately smile. He had been right. He did know the store that George had been talking about. It was funny, how many things he had taken for granted. He came here often with Mary and even Edith a few times. His wife had most of her frocks ordered and shipped to this store. Edith's doomed wedding dress had been made here. Matthew had happily paid for it himself, when Robert and Cora were out of pocket after the extravagance of his and Mary's wedding. Now that he saw the village in shambles, the Crawley girls and the loves of their lives old stomping grounds in ruin, he seemed overjoyed to be at a place in which he loathed once. Never had he remembered so fondly sitting in the corner, bringing patronage each time to the same articles from the same five magazines that they had by the changing rooms.

He was wholly satisfied that at least something was still alive of the days of their youth.

George walked to the front of the store with the scratch of stone and weeds underfoot and pounded rudely on the door. The noise echoed down the street with three loud bangs of a hammering fist. Matthew looked on disapprovingly at the racer's inhospitality at such a late evening calling, and the aggressive knocking meant to awaken anyone sleeping. The soldier looked around in embarrassment, knowing that he would be awakening most of the street. But George only sighed in annoyance and looked up at the apartment windows above the store.

"I knew it …" the pilot muttered under his breath, pushing back soaked raven curls in frustration. He walked to the storefront window, and with a saluting hand to block the glare, he pressed his face to the glass. "They're hiding out in the shelter tonight." He grunted in annoyance. Moving from the window, George tried to force the door open with a ram of his shoulder. But he was met with stout resistance and the tinkle of a banging bell against the door frame.

"Here …" George tossed the Mason shotgun to his father smoothly. Matthew fumbled with it for a moment in half surprise, before he took ahold of it cleanly. He watched his son stride over to the side of the shop that was guarded by an old stone wall covered in trellises of roses and ivy.

"What are you doing?" He asked in puzzlement watching the young man look for grooves in the old stone.

George grunted in study. "I didn't come all of this way for nothing … now keep an eye out." He stepped back and seemed to be plotting out what he was gonna do.

"Keep an eye out for what?"

He suddenly felt like the bookish school boy of his youth who was constantly neglected by the more sporting of the young chaps. It was in the way his own son turned back to him slowly and with annoyance. His look was proof beyond a doubt that he had been pulled from Lady Mary Crawley, which somehow lessened the blow of it.

"Just be cool, alright?" He glared.

While the soldier pondered the meaning of the hip-cat jazz slang, the racing pilot backed away for several paces. Then with a sudden spring, he accelerated toward the corner where the wall and shop met. George leapt up and kicked the side of the store with momentum. Bouncing higher up, his foot caught a whitewashed rung of an ancient trellis, and his hands grabbed at the vines. With shuffling of greenery and a grunt he used the ivy and wood to climb up. Throwing a leg over, he mounted the two sides of the wall like a saddle.

"Go over to the front door." He motioned with his head.

Matthew looked horrified. "Surely you're not going to break into this establishment, are you?" he asked in alarm.

"You've obviously never been to Memphis."

"But what if the Night Watchman comes around?"

"Then that would be the perfect time not to keep these things to yourself, Pops."

"You mean I'm going to help you?"

"I thought I told you to be cool!"

"What does that mean?!"

"Door – Front – Now!"

The soldier felt conflicted and anxious about the criminal activity he was suddenly being accomplice too. Meanwhile, George swung down from his perch. The silence between storm bands was broken by the sudden creaking crunch of something giving way and the ear piercing discomfort of shattering pottery on tile. It was loud and rolling as it echoed through the empty streets and buildings on the main stretch of road in the village. There was some newborn instinct when he rushed to the moldy wall covered in ivy and late blooming roses. It was the way a new parent ran toward a toddler taking his first steps, and there was just as much anxiety in Matthew Crawley's chest when he heard the ruckus.

"Are you quite alright, my dear chap?" He called over the wall.

"Yeah …" George didn't sound very happy. "Thank god there was a termite eaten table filled with razor sharp clay to break my fall!" he replied sarcastically. There was just a touch of an enduring smirk on the soldier's lips as he heard a pot being picked up and smashed in anger against the wall. The sound of facetious crunching could be heard from the other side.

"… Only goddamn place, in the whole goddamn planet were this could happen!"

Resign in his part in all of this, Matthew shouldered the shotgun and readjusted the parachute pack. He walked back to the front of the store and kept watch on the empty street. The reality that he did accept was that there really wasn't anyone in the village. It had been abandoned for the night, and mostly for years now. But there was still something childish in the whole business about keeping watch while someone did something they shouldn't. It went against the nature of his upbringing, and his role as Prefect and Head Boy at his school. He had always been a person of authority, trusted to be the one that kept an eye on everything. To mind the store, as it were. But being around George, he was given a brand new look at life.

George Crawley was quickly distinguishing himself as someone who might have given Matthew and Mary a run for their money as parents in his youth.

Lady Mary had always been a prim and proper princess. She was her father's daughter, liking things that were according to plan and conventional. It had taken six years of knowing one another before she allowed herself even the thought of surrendering to the love she had for the middle-class Solicitor. Matthew wasn't sure where this rebellious personality came from in their child. But he'd be lying if he didn't admit that he quite liked it. Their boy was a rather nice change of pace than what anyone had been used to in these parts. Though, to be fair to his wife and Lady Grantham, Matthew also didn't spend all of the boy's life taking the brunt of this behavior, nor dealing with the consequences of it. Being that even now, years since George had last stepped foot in Downton, the first thing Lady Grantham would greet any law enforcement official or officer with _"Whatever it is, George didn't do it."_ All of it coming on instinct from just one year of the young rebel hotshot returning home from America with one foot in the grave and the other on the peddle.

It had been so long now since the soldier had felt so close to youth. It might have been the situation, or just the retreading of all the old places with the strong memories, that brought out the kid inside of him. But being a part of something rather mischievous, had taken him back to the only time he had ever felt like a kid, ever felt like he belonged in a group of friends. With his mother being what she was, and his father being a well-respected pediatric doctor, it was hard for Matthew to make friends with peers when his parents had always expected adult like behavior from him at all times. In fact he was often considered older, even beyond his years, by his instructors. So much so that he was considered almost a member of the faculty by the other boys.

The only time Matthew had ever felt so young, felt his own age, was a trip to Brighton with the Crawley girls a month before he proposed to Mary for the first time.

Sybil, at the time, had wanted to go on a small holiday to Brighton for her eighteenth birthday. Lord and Lady Grantham had been hesitant. Especially, when Sybil had stated her intention to take one of the cars and drive down. She had read a most wonderful article about "road holidays" that every modern teenager must go on. At the time she was only planning on taking Tom with her. Lady Grantham had almost caved to her youngest daughter, when Lord Grantham had refused to let a Chauffeur, barely a man himself, be her only chaperon. She relented in allowing Mary and Edith to come along, but once again, three young women's only chaperon was a chauffeur. That Friday at lunch and later that Saturday on a hike, Sybil begged Matthew to come along. "Oh, Papa would so very much warm to the idea if he only knew that you'd be coming!" She had implored. Both she and Tom had wanted to see England, the real England, not the posh hotels and restaurants that her status and class had allotted her. Though much later, Matthew suspected that the young Irishman didn't have any interest in seeing England as he did wanting to spend as much time as he could with his two loves … Sybil and cars.

It was an awkward time between Matthew and Mary. For months he had lain in the dark, thinking of the way he had held her hand in the library. The look of surprise and hesitation on her beautiful face of some great realization in that moment had made his heart lurch. And afterward all he could do was think of that loaded flicker of time and wonder what it had all meant. Then the dinner with Anthony Strallan, when he found himself accounted for nothing but a few cheap laughs at the table. When Sybil had come to him, he was in torment of the night he had held Mary's hand just a moment too long.

Matthew had been in love with Lady Mary Crawley from the very first moment he had laid eyes on her. And for years he had tried to make right the one comment that he had made in his heady rush of … rebellion. In his revelry, Matthew smirked when thinking of the answer to the question of George. But long before his greatest accomplishment, he went to bed every night in pain and longing for his boy's mama, a young woman that would not have him. There had been many girls over the years that Matthew had longed for but did not reciprocate affection for the slightly husky young man who talked too much of books. But this was different …

Lady Mary Josephine Crawley was different.

To be without her hurt, and yet, to be around her hurt even more. It hurt because he loved her. It hurt because he despised her, because she was too beautiful to even be around without being intoxicated by her sheer presence. He had run the gambit of emotions. All of them were equally strong. No matter what he felt, it was brought to the extreme and all in whatever flicker was in her red tinted eyes when they fell on him. There were times when he had to ask himself was she truly worth all of these long nights, driven half-mad by the smile directed at him, whether practiced or genuine. But he could not escape her memory, her beauty, and the velvet cadence of her perfect bass voice. Matthew had wanted her, wanted her more than he had wanted anything in his life, and she had no interest in him.

And now they were to spend an entire trip together.

Robert was putty in Sybil's hand when he relented upon hearing that Matthew was going along with them. He apologized to his heir for being strong armed into the trip, telling him that all of his girls do come on strong. But the young man had reassured his older compatriot that it would be good to get out there and play the tourist.

The sun hadn't even risen when they had left Downton. Though, one would've never known that they had a late start, when Sybil got into a heated argument with her sisters. They wanted to take Anna with them. In a trip that was supposed to be an intimate journey of self-discovery with only Tom as her companion, was now a car full of people. Sybil wouldn't allow any more hangers on. When they left, there were a few more noses out of joint than there should've been.

At the start of the trip Mary had been all smiles, trying hard to reconcile from her snub of Matthew at dinner, playing up their little inside jokes. But for his own survival, and the guarding of his heart from being damaged any further, he had no words for her. Instead, he engaged in conversation with Edith. And there he found something within the young woman that others overlooked. There was a kinship born from a similar background of personality and likes. Though Matthew was never sure if Edith had actually liked the things he did, or if it was all part of her research in her chase to the marriage alter. But, either way, they had something to talk about, and he found himself enjoying her company. It also didn't hurt that the endless chatter and visible friendship being struck between Matthew and Edith, had made Mary look as if she was just about to jump out of the car. She'd run back to Downton as fast as possible if she overheard the names Sherlock Holmes and "John Carter of Mars" just one more time.

There was discussion of Science Fiction with Matthew and Edith, the private, chuckled, whispering between Sybil and Tom in the front seat, and the overall discussion of politics and current events between the four of them. Mary had found herself quite left out of all of it. Despite her superiority of being socially popular, she had found herself lacking in the general knowledge to participate without being teased and mocked by everyone else. Despite the pleasure that Matthew could've derived from seeing Mary being put out, for once. He found himself feeling sympathetic at their luncheons and dinners in pubs. The country princess was out of her element amongst the rest of the commoners, visiting churches, Museums, going from hotel to inn, to hotel looking for a vacancy like middle and lower class travelers.

Sybil, Tom, and even Edith to a lesser degree had found themselves having the time of their lives in all of their adventures. In settings which no one knew who they were, and no warden to enforce social standings, what was proper was given up in the freedom of anonymity to be whoever they wanted to be. It was a feeling that Sybil would never forget, forever ingrained in those perfect few days with the people she loved and the open road in front of them. And she'd spend the rest of her life chasing the freedom of those feelings.

The trip could've been hell for Lady Mary if Matthew had been apathetic to her discomfort. But he had put aside his shield and tucked her behind it with him. It might have been at a pub owner's expense, but he had wrestled from the bitter beauty a loud and long laugh. He had done it by mocking the beastly unpleasant man twice his size, while his back was turned. Edith looked horrified, Sybil was in tears trying to hold back her laughter, and Tom was shaking as he hid in his pint. But when Mary broke, the jig was up. Matthew had gotten knocked out for his trouble. But waking up in Mary's lap in the back of the car, it was all worth it just to look up and see her smiling again. Afterward, she finally came to share in the merriment of their journey. She even found amusement in the things that would have scared her only days before. There was nothing but wit and quip when they ran out of gasoline in a backwater while taking one of Edith's shortcuts.

As long as Matthew was there to catch her, Lady Mary Crawley was undaunted.

Helping her, though, came at his detriment. In every smile, laugh, and significant look shared, she undid him from inside out. It was becoming too hard to sit next to her, to talk to her, to even just smell her near without feeling the crippling clench of his heart. He loved her, loved her till there was nothing but a very abyss in his soul where she was missing in his life, and in every conceivable future that lay before him. It was an ache, a pain, an excruciation that could not be healed. Fore behind all the laughing, the conversations, the coupling in groups, she didn't want him. He was fine, a good place holder, till something better came along.

And that was what she had found in Brighton.

Sybil had protested, but Lady Grantham had forced them to make reservations at a posh hotel there. To Mary and Edith it was like a homecoming after a week in the wilds of the real world. Each of them had their own Lady's Maid provided by the Hotel. But after all their adventures and bonding, Lady Mary had turned her back on all of them at the first chance. There had been a party of young Lords, Ladies, and Viscounts that Mary had known from years of London seasons. She started by dismissing Tom, then she invited her 'old friends' to Sybil's birthday dinner, an event that was a private affair in which Tom was invited and Mary's friends were not. At the news that Tom was uninvited and that Mary was turning her birthday into a society affair that could've been had at Downton, Sybil accused Mary of being the 'worst person on the whole planet' and fled to her room in tears. It was her party, and she wanted the people she loved … liked to be there, not the people that Mama and Granny would invite. Edith also laid into Mary for ruining everything "as usual", and chased after Sybil. But when Mary had turned to Matthew, he was nowhere to be found, as she had also tossed him over for more sporting chaps, just like everyone else had in his life.

The sound of waves lapping over the sandy beaches still echoed in Matthew's head. The sky was a brilliant water color painting of oranges and violet. The fiery sun going down over the crystal ocean, its rays sparkled in the water's reflection like an ocean of diamonds. It was a perfect sight to the sorrow that he had felt in that moment. It had become intolerable to feel the way he did and know that it was not enough, that he was not enough. He couldn't stand it any longer, nor could he sit by and watch other men successfully capture the heart that they only half wanted. He'd go back to Manchester. He'd leave his mother behind in Downton where she had found her happiness, locked in endless battle with the Dowager. Even if he were to live alone as a bachelor, abandon all the friends he had made this last week, he could not live this way. In sight, in touch, in smell of the one thing that he just couldn't have.

Lady Mary had a fun journey with her family those last couple of days. But Matthew Crawley would be in love for the rest of his life.

Then from the corner of his eye, below his seawall perch, he saw a figure bathed in the dying light. The sparkling reflection of the sea was in her eyes as she looked out to the sunset. She was barefoot as she walked the beach, her pearl white evening gown lifted to her pale ankles. Her elbow gloves were rolled up in her hand. Matthew swallowed hard to stifle the emotion that ran through him like acid. He shut his eyes to the sight, but he couldn't fight the very quiver that Cupid had emptied into him. So he looked on at the most beautiful woman in the world lit by the sunset and glimmering water. If the young man could've died in that very moment, he'd not begrudge the killer, because he would have seen the most perfect last image that any mortal man could ask.

As if sensing his piercing gaze, Mary had turned, and located him. There was the saddest of smirks on her face, her eyes uncharacteristically vulnerable. There was lonesomeness to her figure in the shadows. But Matthew did not return her smirk. He couldn't do anything but stare. Anything but behold his very pain, sorrow, and love taken in this single, angelic form. He did not break his stupor till she had joined him on the stone steps.

Eyes watery and red, he was tired of trying to hide the pain from her. He did not fight the look on his face as he gazed out to the ocean. Mary did not insult him by acting coy, or by asking him what was wrong. The rationality that came into her mind in her Granny's voice would tell her that she couldn't be blamed for any of this, any of his feelings. But Mary wasn't strong enough to be that cold, that heartless. Sybil's words rattled hard in her mind and in her heart, made only worse by turning to find Matthew gone. She had attended dinner that night with the cream of society by herself, and somewhere between the second and third courses, she had found their company to be wanton. It was hard to believe, but she actually missed her sisters company, she missed Tom, the bloody chauffeur of all people … But most of all, she missed Matthew at her side.

There was no greeting, no preamble, and no lead into the question. Vulnerable, sad, and lonely, Mary turned to Matthew and asked him if she was truly the worst person Matthew had ever known. Glassy eyed, the young man shifted his jaw, his throat tight. If he were anyone else, he'd berate this spoiled brat. That in his most hurt moment; she still turned and asked for comfort from the one person she had wounded so terribly. But he just couldn't bring himself to hate her, no matter how devastated she had always left him in the past.

"If you're looking for condemnation, Cousin Mary, I'm the last man you should ever come too."

Crystal and ruby eyes met in the last light of the day and held. There was that same look of shock and realization on her face. The same that had been there the night he held her hand. But there was something else, something new. It was a different realization, not that he loved her, but that she loved him, loved him in a way that she didn't know was ever possible for her. It wasn't a passing fancy, an infatuation to be burned out. It was a love that was so deeply ingrained inside of her, it was impossible to ignore, to dismiss. It was a part of her …

He was a part of her.

Just for a moment they looked too hard into one another's eyes. They were too close, too filled with sudden emotion and attachments that pulled one another strongly. There was something in smell of the night, the salt, the fried food from the boardwalk stands, and the perfume dabbed on her creamy skin that got to them. They had wanted to embrace, to take one another in their arms. But instead a single tear fell from Matthew's eye. It was all the confirmation Mary needed, all the emotion that they could allow themselves to show in the sight, in arm's length, of everything that they wanted. Mary slowly reached out and cleaned away the young man's tear. Her red tinted eyes were glassy themselves. Her hand lingered on the man's cheek. Matthew shut his eyes tightly and pressed it hard to his face. He exhaled a wheezed breath, as if the very contact of her supple palm to his cheekbone was the first breath of oxygen he had taken after a long dive to the very bottom of the crushing darkness below.

Suddenly her dinner mates called out to her from the distance. They couldn't see them, couldn't see the shaking of Lady Mary's head in protest. It was too hard to leave now, to be taken away from everything that she never thought possible. It couldn't end, it shouldn't end, why did it have too …? Not when they were so close. But it was Matthew who removed her hand from his cheek. He looked as if the most painful ache was goring him to do so, but he remained in fine discipline of an English Gentleman as he restored order to himself.

Mary fumbled, telling him that they can wait, these so called friends. But Matthew only shook his head. They were not on the road. They were not protected by anonymity here. They had their roles to play, and there was no time to discuss all the things that had happened here, in this moment. Entails, contracts, and family legacy were easy. Love … love was complicated for people like her.

If that was what she was truly feeling?

There were so many things to be done and said, to be discussed, to be dragged into the light. But instead, Matthew slowly and deliberately lifted Mary's hand and kissed her knuckle with all the feeling, all the love, as if it were her lips. It wouldn't be enough for most people, but for now, in a world of society and social class, it was good enough. Mary stood and took her leave to join her friends, leaving the young man she saw in a whole new light, on his own. She wiped her eyes when no one was looking and wouldn't sleep a wink that night.

On the way back home, no one talked to the other. All the fun and bonding of the trip up was haunted by Mary's actions in Brighton and the knowledge that they were returning to the shackles of position, class, and distinction that awaited them at Downton. It hung like a shadow over everything that happened on the way back. It didn't escape his notice that Sybil, who had spent so much time in the front seat with Branson, now hid in the backseat with Matthew and her sisters. There were tears in her eyes sporadically. Even Tom was in pain in the front, looking at her from the rear view mirror. They didn't want to go back, didn't know how. He knew how they felt when he'd look over to Mary and see the cold and unfeeling emotions she buried her inner-conflict inside, almost pretending that nothing had happened at all. There was a kindred soul when Sybil saw the way he was looking at her sister. He was surprised at first when she reached over and took her hand in his. He gave her the roughest smirk as she leaned her head on his shoulder with new tears. He rested his cheek on top of her head, sharing in communion with their own sorrow.

When they reached the village, Sybil had asked Tom to pull over just a moment behind the mossy wall outside Downton's gates. They all waited for her to say or do something, but all the teenage girl did was look at everyone and close her eyes. Then, with a depressed nod, they returned home. They had put on fake smiles, fake enthusiasm at the relief and happiness from Lord and Lady Grantham, his mother, and the Dowager at their safe return.

Eventually, they had all went back to their lives as they had left it. But the emotions, the discoveries, and the friendships could not be forgotten, nor be denied. It would take years, and much more heartache, but that one magical trip would find its vindication in those who shared the road together. All the emotions and memories lived on in the flash of the eyes of George Crawley, the smile of Sybbie Branson, and the grace of Marigold Crawley's movements. These children were the legacy of those few perfect days amongst a group of people who'd come to love one another so deeply.

In the forgotten shadows whose phantoms dwelled in the overgrowth and broken structures, crystal eyes were stricken with old emotions. In the neglected places that had served backdrop to all the glory and heartache of youth, Matthew Crawley had fallen in love all over again in reliving such intimate memories of the best and worst days of his life. Surrounded by the ruins of all the smiles and tears of friends, of the family he had made for himself, brought an old pain of a girl wandering by the sparkling waves, shadowed against the sunset.

Suddenly there was a click behind him. The store door opened with a tingle of bells and a rush of air that brought a chill down his soaked spine. He turned to find George in the dark of the store, holding the door open. He looked smug as he leaned on it.

"Now open for business."

For a moment, Matthew stared at the young man emotionally. In his face, smile, and eyes were the echoed voices, feelings, and longing of long nights staring out the Crawley House windows. Days in the office wondering if things would ever change, if there was ever a moment in which she'd look at him and finally know what he knew, feel what he felt. And standing in front of him, in the shadows, was the answer to what seemed so impossible on those lonely, conflicted, nights. The young man, dashing and daring, any fair maiden's delight would've been to that same helpless solicitor all those years ago, like the pondering of how a rare and amazing feat could be managed. George Crawley wasn't just some run of the mill young man, a nameless number. He was a product of such a labored and seemingly impossible love between two people forced together by destiny's design. There was a story, such a story, behind every black curl, fleck in a blue iris, and personal tick. And it all involved the implausibility between two star crossed lovers …

The Lady and the Lawyer.

"You alright?" George raised an eye brow at the man.

Matthew cleared his throat. "Yes, uh, quite, quite alright." He sniffed.

"You look like you've seen a ghost." He observed with a tilt of his head.

To the comment, the soldier just smirked sadly, and yet there was an undeniable sense of pride as he met his son's eyes. "You have no idea, my chap …" As he passed he placed a hand on the youth's shoulder of wet beaten leather. "And I thank God for it every day." He gave another clearing of emotion from his throat and shook the youth with endearment before walking into the store.

While George stood in the doorway, deciphering what that meant, his father entered and gave a good look around. He sighed uneasily, because, whether he liked it or not, he was now an accessory to breaking and entering on private property. "How did you manage to get in?" he asked leaning the shotgun next to the doorway.

The door closed behind them. "Left the back door unlocked …" George brushed past the haunted man. "Someone should've warned them that there're unsavory types around." He wiggled his eye brows at his father playfully as he took in the shop.

"And Nazis." Matthew bit back.

He expected some sort of retort or indignant response from his son. But the racing pilot just made an amused noise in distraction. "True enough …" He chuckled lightly under breath as he took the parachute pack off of the soldier's shoulder. He watched the young man walk behind the counter and dump the leather pack with a clack of studs on polished surface.

Matthew gingerly followed him, looking around at the half sown gowns, and the finished ones dressed on mannequins in the storefront window. He was suddenly enamored with the shimmery material and glamour of the designs. He felt as if he had missed so much, three or four steps of evolution of fashion from Edwardian to these gowns that seemed to come straight from Science Fiction novels. Between airplane flights across oceans, to the shimmery silk of women's ball gowns he ran his hand over, he truly felt that he was in the future.

George made a mirthfully jovial noise. When Matthew turned he found that George had flicked open a zippo with a green four leaf clover on it. He was using Sybbie's lighter to read the store ledger that he had pulled out from under the register.

"Look at this … Mom ordered an evening gown straight from Hollywood last month." He shook his head. "World's on fire, but I guess she thinks it's no excuse to let standards slip. If that dress isn't war profiteering than I'm a duckbill platypus." He muttered to himself. "And look at the price they're charging her for just shipping and handling, hundred and fifty dollars, plus a big ole'fat grand for the dress itself. Sybbie and I could buy our own racer for that!" He was outraged. "Nazi U Boats must have tripled transatlantic shipping prices overnight. That or these people are taking a girl who's never been poor a day in her life for an easy mark." He scoffed in disgust while turning the page. "And they'd be right." He shook his head. To a young man who spent his informative years hiding from Pinkertons and Turkish Bounty Hunters in the poverty stricken South and dust covered Southwest of Depression America, it was unfathomable that someone would spend that kind of wealth on extravagance.

"I'm sure she'll be the absolute vision of a Grecian goddess." There was something longing in the Matthew's voice. He hadn't forgotten how lovely, how beautiful, his wife had always been. And surrounded by all the soft and smooth finery around him, he could only imagine what a sight she'd be in just one of the glamorous dresses.

George snorted. "For eleven hundred bucks of dress, I'd marry her." He said sincerely. When he looked up playfully to see Matthew's shocked expression, George gave an arrogant smirk of the most trolling nature. "Don't worry, Pops …" He chuckled under his breath as he switched out ledgers. "I'd gouge my eyes out after the first couple of kids, promise." He began looking up their ordering lists for material.

"I'd be careful, chap, one of these days people will think you mean what you say."

There was something impotent in the youth's expression as he trailed his searching finger down the list. "I hope they do." He replied distractedly. "There'd be a whole lot less rich assholes hanging on Donk and Granny's bell all day." He tapped an index finger on the price the shop last paid for ten yards of silk.

Matthew looked to his son with just a flash of something akin to jealousy, maybe even anger. "It isn't as bad as all that is it?" He was hopeful, suddenly remembering Kamal Pamuk's dinner and later Sybil's birthday, surrounded by suitors. When Mary was the absolute center of attention, she didn't have the constitution for what one might consider good judgment. She had always relied on Matthew to steer her straight. He now worried that without him, no one was there to stop her from making fool of herself. And judging from what George had to say, there were only people in her life that received the brunt of her consequences.

"Couldn't tell you …" George placed the book away. "What mom does with her own time is her business. I couldn't give a damn who's giving it to her, and what's she's getting out of it." There was the echo of an old bitterness in his boy's voice. But more to the point, it would seem that Matthew found exactly something that he had passed on to his child.

The tell for when he was lying.

Matthew's eyes lightened in sympathy. "You don't mean that, surely …" He pushed knowingly.

A chuckle was barely a wrapper on the angry emotion that was hidden beneath it. "Listen, pal, the last time I got involved in my mother's life, I ruined her engagement party, while putting a bullet hole through Granny Violet's coat of arms in the foyer. Then, there was the time I got into a boxing match with a socialist meat head that was built like an ape. Just because she couldn't keep her damn fool mouth shut. And after every mess she made, she blamed _me_ for all the misery in her life. I was the asshole in all of the situations according to her. So, hell yes, I am serious." George waved Matthew off as he continued to look around the back wall suspiciously.

Blonde eyebrows nearly touched his matching hairline, when he heard of the bullet hole. "How did you manage that?!" he exclaimed in shock.

George frowned. "If I were a safe, where would I hide …" He muttered to himself observing the wall behind the counter. He turned back to the soldier only half-heartedly, hearing his question. "Oh, uh, I took mom's fiance's Champagne glass, downed it, and tossed it in the air. Shot it like a clay pigeon … didn't think that the glass wasn't gonna stop the bullet … ah, you live and learn, right?" He finished nonchalantly. When he turned and saw his father look disapprovingly at him, he felt suddenly defensive, and for the first time … in the wrong.

"Look, I'd been gone eight years. Came home to find the village trashed and my grandmother convinced that I was Mom. All of it topped off by some mouth breather in a monkey suit and clipboard who wouldn't even let me into my own house through the front doors, because I wasn't on some list for mom and her movie star boyfriend's big Hollywood engagement party. So, yeah, maybe I was a little darker place than usual that night I walked up." He turned back conflicted. He knew what he was doing back then, and if anyone needed a bit of hubris, it was Queen "Bloody" Mary. There was no way he'd allow a figment of his imagination to judge him on one of the hardest days he ever had.

He remembered the packed foyer of Downton going silent the minute that the rugged teenager with shoulder length black curls wandered through the crowd, halting Lord Grantham's speech. He might not have recognized the boy at first, but anyone who looked that much like his late daughter surely was who Robert knew him to be. In the very fancy crowd, he stood out like a sore thumb. With his mahogany, double breasted, leather coat that he took off a dead bounty hunter in the Fort Worth Stockyards, and Vodou charm necklace he won off a Haitian shaman in a dangerous game of chance in the backroom of a French Quarter magic shop in New Orleans …

He was hard not to miss among the glitz and glamor of Downton restored.

Lady Mary looked frightfully annoyed in her submission of what was going to happen next in the moment her son came face to face with her. Their accidental reunion had come earlier that week at a London Nightclub. Her fiancé was outraged to see the punk kid that had given him his black eye the night, now at their party. George had a moment of pleasure, taking the bubbly from his hand, at the knowledge that no one had told the Nazi sympathizer who he was yet. He toasted the coming disengagement, downing the man's glass, before he tossed it in the air. The group of fancy Lords, Ladies, actors, actresses, producers, and agents scattered the moment George drew his revolver and bulls-eyed the gliding glass mid-air. He gave a showy gunfighter twirl of his father's weapon as glass rained on the foyer carpet. After a silent moment, allowing not only the peerage but his own family get a good look at what one horrible Christmas Eve and seven years in a lawless foreign land looked like, George bid a cocky farewell to a coldly furious Mary, outing just who she was to him. There was a look of shock and fear on her actor beau's face when confronted with the truth of their relationship. It was an immediate deal breaker. That night, and the grandiose way in which George had ruined it was an opening salvo of a yearlong war between the prodigal son and his lady mother, whose final battle would be fought in the same foyer of Downton on a night just like this.

"Was it so important to ruin that for her?" Matthew asked.

George grunted in response. "Roger Sinclair was a Nazi bastard who was after two things, mom's family name, to impress his buddies in Berlin, and Sybbie's virginity. He got one of the two, and for that, he was lucky that his Champagne glass was the only thing I shot off." There was an old hatred in his voice. It was the same deadly tone from the pilot that had been awoken in the forest and was born many years ago through a crack in a Knickerbocker bedroom door.

There was a long moment of silence at the telling of such beastly behavior from Mary's lover. Matthew remembered Sybil as sixteen, when he first met her, pure and innocent. He would fight the man who strove to touch the girl he remembered in the way her daughter was. "He didn't force himself on her … did he?" He asked very carefully, very tightly controlled of emotion. He remembered the sweet little babe in Mary's arms, her tiny eyes never leaving the woman that had loved her so much, so immediately. He'd feel devastated if his fears were confirmed.

There were thunks as George began to remove tacks on an old advertisement on the wall that seemed to clash with the rest of the décor of the store. "Not technically." He responded.

"What does that mean?"

A sigh of a dark voice answered. "It means that Sybbie was in love. Sadly Sinclair was only in love with the way she looked in mom's Lingerie. That's what that means. She wanted to run away with him to Hollywood, and all he wanted was a tight and perfectly proportioned step-daughter with her mama's looks and half the sass. It wasn't gonna work." He shook his head. "She risked her entire relationship with mom, the only mother she's ever gonna have, by trying to steal her boyfriend. All just because she said Sinclair really loved her, not mom. Turned out he was a better actor than I thought. Fled in the night when everyone was asleep. Sybbie hasn't been the same ever since." There was nothing but regret in his voice.

He remembered entering the party through the servant's door under the staircase. He hadn't walked two steps, before a girl in a pearl white satin dress and long tresses of black curls came storming down the steps. He had never seen Sybbie looks so beautiful, so perfect. He had expected her to embrace him after six months of not seeing one another. Instead she had tried to have him thrown out. Her face was awash with panic and fear at seeing him there so suddenly. George had gotten everyone's attention when he knocked out Sybbie's security guard. Betrayed, he had pushed Sybbie to the ground after she grabbed him, telling him that he was ruining _her_ big night, ruining everything. After he had made his scene and waltz out of Downton for the night, Sybbie was there to greet him. Since that day, no one has gotten George Crawley as cleanly with a fist as Sybil Branson did that night. She accused him of being _"The worst person on the planet"_ and swore she'd hate him forever. Thomas helped him up as they watched her flee back into the party in tears. Neither had ever seen her act that way before in her life, like a debutante.

All that morning, he put iced meat against his jaw, enduring a lecture from his grandmother Isobel about how Ladies of his stature didn't fight with their fists. The doorbell rang just as she asked if he'd like her to broker a meeting between Lady Grantham and Mabel Lane Fox's mother to discuss the incident. He answered the door knowing that he'd have to explain to someone eventually that Lady Gillingham did not, in fact, punch out Lady Mary last night. When he opened the door, he found Sybbie, looking like a fairy tale princess after a happily ever after that never came true. Her magical gown was soaked and clinging to her perfect pale frame. She was standing at the front door in the rain, sobbing. All that night he had only vengeance planned to visit upon the traitor, but when the broken beauty held her soiled gloved arms out to him, he responded immediately. Stepping into the cold rain, George swept her off her feet and carried her inside. He sat in his father's chair cuddling the soaked girl tightly by the fire as she cried into the crook of his neck. Isobel tried to help, saying that she had all the faith in the world that her parents would come to accept Tom for who he was, eventually.

Sybbie had told everyone at Downton what had been going on. Her father hit the roof, and Robert had exploded. But it didn't matter, because she was running away with Sinclair to Hollywood and there was nothing they could do about it. One might not have recognized the girl who so cruelly gave her mama a smacking for being a "Cold, awful, bitch!" who didn't deserve Roger. Mary looked positively shocked and stricken as she watched the girl storm off with her suitcase. Sybbie had waited at the station the entire night in the cold. But Sinclair was gone and was never coming back. Heartbroken, possessed by the very sorrow of shattered first love, and utterly humiliated for the things she said to Mary, she ran to the only comfort she knew … George.

With the exception of the use of the restroom, Sybbie never left George. She was in shock, and wherever George went, he was holding her hand, wherever he was sitting, she was in his lap, and wherever he lay, she was curled up in his arms. Eventually, their Aunt Edith was the first to come to bring her home, saying that no one hated her, that no one was angry at her. But she elected to stay with the old comfort of the nursery, the comfort of being around her best friend and brother. Lady Grantham had tried next. She was kind, lovingly sweet, and so comforting. She had told her that no matter what she had done, or had happened to her, they'd all love her. But once again she chose the crutch of George.

It wasn't till Mary herself came to Crawley House that the girl came home. At first, Sybbie hid from her, afraid and deeply shamed for the things done and said. But to George's surprise, Mary took the teenage girl in her arms and told her that there was never a day in her life in which she would ever hate her. Sinclair had humiliated both of them, ruined both of them, and only together would they overcome it. Even though she had spoken those words to Sybbie, Mary had never taken her eyes off George, who stood was leaning against the kitchen door frame with his arms crossed. The boy responded by spitting in the kitchen sink. Mary got the message crystal clear.

Over the years she had gotten much better. Even now she was much like the old Sybbie he loved. But she was tougher, too tough, some might say. She was abrasive, mouthy, and ill-tempered toward people. And after encounters with interested young men, there was something very childlike in the way she'd seek George out. At the airdrome, when she'd drop in his lap as he wrote a report, or body flop on top of him on their cot, even when she snuggle in tight after a bloody and hard day. She'd play it off as horsing around. But in the night, as she slept against him, George could feel the scars of humiliation of her stolen virginity that still haunted her.

It was a long and measured look that Matthew gave his son. "He ran because you were gonna kill him, weren't you?" He didn't blink.

When George ripped off the vintage, Victorian, advertisement, it revealed a turn of the century safe behind it. There was no lie in the youth when he turned around to grasp an abandoned tea cup. He met his father's eyes across the room and was silent for a beat.

"He knew it too." He confirmed tossing out half a cup of cold tea on the planked floor. "Heard about what happened in New York, got out as fast as he could." He didn't brag, only stated fact. Matthew watched his son place the brim of the cup against the safe and his ear against the bottom. Slowly, the pilot began to turn the dial on the metal box listening for pins.

It all returned to that story, those haunted eyes when he mentioned New York, brought up the Pinkertons in the forest. He remembered the rage, the very soul of hatred in the way George had tortured the wounded Nazi in the woods. Something happened all those years ago in New York, and now Matthew knew just enough to answer part of his own question. There was a cautious flicker in his blink, before he spoke.

"The man you killed in New York, was he, was he your first?" He was hesitant, but he felt he couldn't back down, not when it weighed so heavily on his boy. "That's what happened in New York, isn't it? You killed a man, for the first time." He nodded.

George didn't stop fiddling with the safe dial. For the briefest of seconds he thought that maybe he didn't hear him. But eventually the Ace took a long measured breath. "You know …" He started. "Marigold asked me that same question once." He reported. There was a loud clank that echoed through the store. Pulling the handle, the door to the safe protested with a high pitched screech. "At the time, I was angry and drunk enough to tell her the story in full." As he answered, he began counting out Lady Mary's paper within.

Inside were expensive jewels, pearl necklaces, and diamond rings. But George didn't take the family heirlooms. He didn't even take the full complement of pounds in the safe. He only took what the price was that they usually spent on silk for a dress ordered from the big house. When he was done, he slammed shut the safe with a shoulder clenching pound of squealing metal. He rounded on Matthew with dark and sorrowful eyes as he pocketed the money.

"It's a mistake I won't make twice." He finished.

The weight, the fear of losing control, still hung off the neck of the young hero like an anchor that was dragging him closer and closer to hell itself. The vicious hatred, the black hole of rage, born every day he remembered his father died on the day was born. The Christmas when his baby sister died, all the years his mother blamed him for it, and all the long frightening night spent in San Sochi. It bred in the young man a darkness that went down to the root of his soul, a sleepless anger that unleashed a devil's violence when he lost control.

In the memories and self-reflection of the things he had done in his past, he couldn't meet this man's gaze. He looked over his head and saw something familiar. With a shake of his head he drove the memories away or at least attempted too. He walked away from the very face of understanding and love that he couldn't bear. Matthew heard his son chuckle emptily at something beyond several Mannequin displays of ancient Egyptian inspired dress designs. Worried for his boy's state of mind under such a heavy burden that he had tried to lighten, he seemed made of stone on his walk over. But it was like being hit in the gut at what he saw.

There was a portable table that sat on the other side of the store. On the fake wood was a paper banner hanging in front of it. **"Downton Abbey Tours"** was written bombastically. There were pamphlets and a register book for tickets. Off to the side was a little stand with a graphic design of Downton itself, with the same advertisement, boasting a walk through living history. It listed the ticket prices for children and adults, and tour times. But what really hit the soldier was not the idea of tours for the house. It was what was flanking the table on either side.

The frock to the left was one he knew well, and remembered fondly. It was turquoise, aqua, and floral, and instead of a skirt, it had billowy pantaloons. Till this day, though frock and black headband were on a mannequin, he still could see Sybil posing for everyone, relishing their reactions whether mesmerized or jilted. There was always something to love about Sybil, and he couldn't find a fault in any memory of her. But what drew him was the other gown on the right.

He walked up to it slowly, eyes suddenly glassy again. His hand was shaky as he reached out and touched the bodice. He still could recall how he felt standing in the church, more nervous than he was at the Somme. He was shaking in his trousers, a great feat considering how starched both he and Tom's had been. After six years, he had a right to be more nervous than he had actually been. But the mistakes, the miscommunications, the war, the wheelchair, Richard Carlisle, and Reggie's money, it was almost a certainty that something was going to go wrong. He had been prepared for her not to walk through that church door. But it left him completely unprepared for the moment that the march started and he saw her coming toward him. Veil down, wearing the most beautiful gown imaginable, but most rewarding of all, was that she was glowing. She wasn't nervous, she wasn't conflicted, and she wasn't even passive. There had never been a more joyous bride that walked down to that ancient alter than Lady Mary Crawley.

That day she married not the man of her dreams, but the man who made them.

All these years later, there it was, on display. Mary's wedding dress was fitted perfectly over the dummy, veil included. It was being used as part of the advertisement to promote the tours of the great house. Immediately he wondered if Mary knew that someone had loaned them her dress, or had it been her that put it up? Had twenty years flown by so slowly that she had no regard of that day anymore? Matthew was afraid of all the answers, more so than the questions he asked himself. Slowly he traced the torso, almost imagining the sleek smoothness of his wife's belly, the pulsing breath underneath the material.

"I can't believe they have this … Sybbie must have lent it to them."

George was behind the table and had pulled something off the wall behind the two ticket sellers' seats. In his hand was a large hanging frame. Matthew kissed his palm and ran it over the wedding gowns skirts before tearing himself away. He stood next to his son to see the protected canvas. Immediately he felt like a child again upon taking in what was in George's hand. It looked like the cover of a book that Matthew, at any age really, would squander a small fortune to have and read over and over again.

It was a framed poster of the most exciting graphic art.

There was a depiction of a setting sun over a desert backdrop. In the center was an old medieval fortress flying the red cross of the crusades. All of it had been overshadowed by the Egyptian Sphinx. Coming right at the observer on either side of the poster were two rather dashing, single winged airplanes, sleek and aerodynamic. One was black and yellow, the other blue with silver streaks on the wings. Above the black and yellow plane, covering its corner of the poster was the black Nazi Swastika on a red field. There, in the corner above the blue and silver streaked racer, sat a single American star in the center of the Allied Roundel on a blue field.

A moment of excitement, not as a father, but just as a fan of this kind of spectacle of adventure overwhelmed Matthew. "Good lord, my dear chap, is that …?!" He was beaming at the young man who was more nostalgically reserved with a sad lilt in his cocky grin.

Under the Nazi plane was the name _"Wulfric "The Wolf" Von_ _Montenuovo"_ in bold. Under the Austrian pilot was _**"**_ _ **Löwen Wahrheit"**_ which was the name of his plane. But under the blue and silver racer named _**"The Thunderfighter"**_ was _"George "The Comet" Crawley"_ His name emblazoned over a bombastic streaking blue comet. It announced that the race was to be had on 21st of December 1939 at the British Pavilion. At the bottom of the poster announced the name of the event.

" **The Chevalier Run"**

"The Thunderfighter?" Matthew asked in extreme interest.

George just snickered under his breath fondly. "The name of Buck Roger's rocket ship." He smirked with a poignant look. "It's Sybbie and my favorite movie serial." He shrugged.

It occurred to the soldier in that admission, that behind all of this pomp and circumstance, the very futuristic machinery that made this adventure possible, it was all being handled by eighteen year old teenagers. The marquee racer and his engineer where just a bunch of kids. It led him down the rabbit hole of the realization that this war was being fought by children, youth that were much younger than he was when he went to the last Great War. Back then it had been spurn by patriotism and duty in which young men had enlisted to fight the Hun. Now it was for sheer survival, for the protection of one's home and loved ones in which younger boys than allowed in his war were drafted into the fight. As a youth barely out of his teens, George Crawley would've been the littlest of the chaps in Matthew's Regiment. But in this war, the young man was one of the old men.

"This actually came out a year after the race. This is a mock-up they did for the World's Fair in New York. The race was held over the old Crusader Stronghold of Krak De Chevaliers. This poster is for the premier of the footage of the race that a photographer took with a new movie camera he was showing off at the fair's demonstration." The youth corrected the misconception surrounding the now legendary race.

"It wasn't a planned event?" Matthew took the poster from the featured man on it.

"Hardly …" The pilot raised an eyebrow. "It was a private wager, not part of the Colonial Circuit." There was something cocky in his revelry. "It was perpetrated at a back alley tavern in Jerusalem by old Kruger Van Ulrich, "The Baron" …" there was a playful raid of eyebrows and mock grandeur in his voice to relay the insistence of greatness to his companion. Matthew smiled looking back down at a poster he wanted to take with him. "Boastful old son of a bitch … reminded me of the Hindenburg a bit." He scratched his scruff.

"Because the disaster?"

"The size of him. Let's just say that there wasn't a chicken dinner that the old ace didn't do a fly by on after the war." Both men chuckled as George elaborated the rotund, former, German pilot by making a pooching gut with his arms. And for a second, in the shadows, Matthew thought he tasted salty pudding again. "He had more gas than the Zeppelin. The old aristocrat could talk himself into a fortune and then right back in debt in a single sentence." He nodded in memory. There was an adversarial fondness in the silence that George gave for the benefactor and Patron to the National Socialist Party of Germany's racing team. He tilted his head and Matthew caught a dangerous glimmer in his eye as he looked at the name opposite his.

"Wulfric "The Wolf" Von Montenuovo" He said in query to his son. "Whatever happened to him?" He asked. He was expecting another funny little story. But George was far from a joking mood at the mention of him.

He shifted his jaw. "Ran into him today." He nodded. "He killed a lot of men … lot of good men, this afternoon. He almost got both of us too." He said absently.

Matthew suddenly flashed back to the road, the marker, and the smoking ME 109 diving on the grounded plane, the grounded pilot. It filled the soldier with dread and with anger. Matthew didn't know much about air-fighting and pilots. But he knew there was a sort of honor in the way they fought one another. And it was the most egregious of sins and the height of dishonor to kill a fellow pilot while he was on the ground. From what little he saw of this "Wolf" he knew now how he got his name.

George was worryingly quiet all of the sudden. "Good men." He repeated quietly and closed his eyes. There in his mind he could still see Atticus with a tri-corn hat folded from newspaper and an eye patch. He was laughing as he playfully fenced his wife and children with sticks on the grand staircase of San Sochi. There was confusion on Matthew's face when George took the poster from his father's hand.

He watched him hang it back on the wall with a forceful clack. "I should've killed Montenuovo a long time ago, when I had a chance." He hung his head as he braced himself against the wall, suddenly winded in an old regret.

His voice dark and filled with a brooding memory of flashes of a happy family man intermingled with a moment of supposed honor that came in sparing a life in the heat of conflict. He had been trying so hard to redeem himself after his loss of control and reason in the storming of a Knickerbocker bedroom armed with the only thing his father had left him. And now his honor in that moment of reprieve was worth as much as fool's gold in the loss of a father and husband today.

Crystal eyes lightened into a deep sympathy. He saw how hard his boy had come down on himself for taking honorable routes in choices of moral questions. It was hard not only as a father, but as a fellow human being, to see a young man brooding in regret of being a good man in the chaos of war. The swallow of emotion he gave was audible as he approached George.

"But you didn't …" he said seriously. "And you didn't because you're not that kind of man, my chap. You're a good man, no matter what you might think … I see your quality. And I couldn't be more proud." He shook his boy's shoulder.

A flash of lightning seemed to go off behind the dark blue eyes of the young pilot. He rounded on the man in surprise of the words spoken to him. It was hard to decipher what he was feeling behind them. There was just the quiver of emotion in his jaw. Matthew saw the same look of realization that the most beautiful woman in the world had given him on a Brighton beach so long ago.

But just when he was expecting to be accepted, the young man walked away from him. For a long beat of silence the youth paced till he stopped in front of the same wedding dress that was so instrumental to his creation. It was silk and lace, five feet of fabric that was as important to his genesis as the DNA that created him. For a long quiet pause he couldn't take his eyes off his mama's wedding dress.

"You don't know what you're talking about." He replied harshly in the dark.

"What do you mean, of course I do …" Matthew frowned indignantly at the harsh rebuke of his encouragement.

"No, you don't …"

"Why wouldn't I?" Matthew took a step closer.

There was something that clenched deep inside of him when he saw the way George reached out and touched his mother's wedding dress. For all the anger, for all the resentment, and the seeming disinterest, there was something reverent in the way his hand grazed her stomach. Like his father, it was almost as if Mary was there, not the mother he had known, but the young woman that Matthew knew, the one he loved so much. Somewhere in those most heartfelt moments of their love, their only child was reaching through time to feel her. Reaching back through time to the happiest moment of their lives and trying to absorb just a tiny flicker of it. And it broke Matthew's heart to see the absolute failure of the attempt on the boy's face when he let his hand drop from the gown in defeat.

George turned back to his companion, his eyes brooding and sorrowful. "When you look at me and see something special ... it bothers me." He said with a voice of stone. "Because you have no idea …" He shook his head. "No idea of the things I've done. The very horrors, the very nightmares, I've authored and have to live down." He showed his father his hands as if they were covered in blood that could not be washed off.

All Matthew could do was look as if he had heard all of this before. It was a cold night, on the search for Isis, Robert's beloved dog. It was an evening by the carnival lights as she told him that her life made her angry. It was by the shores of Brighton, on a salty sunset, with music and the smell of the night in the air. The boy's mother turned to him the same way her son did now, so vulnerable and hurt by life. Both of them had asked Matthew to confirm all of their worst fears of themselves. But when asked for the self-indulgence of the misery in their hearts, he still had no course, no reason to ever change his answer. Matthew walked forward till he was face to face with his son.

"If you're looking for Condemnation, I'm the last man you should come too. Fore there's nothing to forgive."

He shook his head, placing a hand on the young man's shoulders. His voice was soft, understanding, and filled with a lifetimes longing of love for a young man who was still, and would always be, the answer to so many midnight prayers. George Crawley would always be the tiniest, dearest, little chap in the world, lying in his mama's arms waiting to be greeted by his father. And nothing would ever change that …

Nothing.

Every unspoken word was in the eyes, touch, and expression on the man's face that was absorbed by George. The youth shrank from it at first, letting out a sputtered emotional breath. But when he looked up, there were tears in his eyes. He wasn't sure the last time he ever felt so close to the very nexus, the very feelings that bore him into the world. He was in the apex of the very warmth and nostalgia people had for his father. But in that one moment, George Crawley now understood everything that had been missing from his mother's life for these last twenty years. And it was beautiful and painful at the same time to now know what had been missing from his life all along.

With a grunted clear of his throat, the haunted youth smirked, cleaning away his tears with a thumb and forefinger. His only response was to give a curt nod with a bit bottom lip. He gave him a smack on the shoulder comfortingly. Overwhelmed with emotions that he could barely hold back on his way out of the store, George paused as he held the door open for himself. He turned back for a moment, the shadows obscuring whatever it was on his face. There was the same sad nod of cynicism that ended with a bowed head. Then, slowly, he left the store with a jangle of bells.

When he was gone, Matthew closed his eyes. He had never known such pain in his life as that of the kind George carried within him. He felt ashamed. Felt that he had let his boy down, that he had let everyone down. With all of his heart he wished he knew what to do, what could be done to help George. And in his moment of doubt he turned to the only phantom he reached for in these hard moments.

His boots clacked on the boarded floor as the low rumble of coming thunder echoed through the empty shop. Quietly, he placed his hand one last time on his wife's wedding gown. He traced the lines of a body that had once worn the dress. "Oh Mary …" He sighed emotionally, closing his eyes as he laid his head against the bodice, trying to steal any comfort he could from an old talisman of days long past.

"What are we going to do?"

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _The Summer Before the War" – Connie Dover_

 _Do not listen to the song if you don't want serious Season 1 nostalgia and Mary/Matthew & Sybil/Tom feelings. I've made this mistake and I don't get choked up, like, I don't cry …_

 _Because I totally didn't …_


	12. Live Oak

**Live Oak**

" _There's a man who walks beside me he is who I used to be  
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me  
And I wonder who she's pining for on nights I'm not around  
Could it be the man who did the things I'm living down"_

* * *

 _ **Fort Worth**_

 _ **1935**_

A swell of blue clouds came sweeping down the open plains, driving the temperatures downward throughout the Southwest. Here, were 'The South' ended and the much vaulted and romanticized 'West' begun was a small city that had little significance to its sister to the east, who considered herself a part of Dixie. Dallas grew every year with the booming oil money market and trade from every major city in the southeast of America. But for "Cow Town", it was night and day. At the very gates to the 'West' Fort Worth was a world apart from the plantations and sharecroppers with their cotton or the oil fields on the Gulf. The very ghosts that one dreamt and could conceive about the 'Wild West' still haunted the streets of this city. The past could be seen behind the veneers of the new deco skyline that stretched into the vast endlessness of the Texas sky. The Cattle Drives, the Rail Yards, the echo of old gun fights outside the brick and stone cattlemen banks downtown all told the story of long ago that was all but faded now in the thirty-five years of a new century. But even now it wasn't so hard to believe, stepping out of the picture theater after watching a western, that this place, these old buildings, had been the setting of such fantasy that one had just watched. Among the honking cars that rolled over the old cobble stone where millions of cattle had once been herded to the Eastern Rail Lines, there was still men, young and old, riding horseback through these city streets.

The spirit of a country, of a centuries old way of life was still deep within the roots of this stone and glass gothic facelift that sprawled forth. A blue tinted darkness fell on the brooding gloom built over the vibrancy of a romanticized past. Many colored holiday lights tinkled and glowed over storefront windows and covered entrances. It's reflections in the glass created a cornucopia of color that surrounded and engulfed the many bundled shadowy figures moving in groups down the freezing winter walk ways. Their minds were not mulling on the coming Christmas merriment a month away. Instead it was their struggles of day to day life.

It was the struggle of a life within the old decaying bones of what once was the very symbol of wealth for the hard working Puncher, Gambler, Gunfighter, and Rancher. It was Forth Worth where their parents and grandparents, had once told them men made their fortune. Yankees and Englishmen would pay top dollar for herds, if you could survive a trail filled with Indians, Outlaws, bad weather, and stampedes. A fortune just easily won from a said Englishmen, Yankee, or newly paid Wrangler, in a lucky hand of poker in the many saloons in the Stockyards. A fortune just as easily lost to a bad man with iron on his hip who didn't like the way you flashed your money, or just the way you looked. That was what Fort Worth was for so many years, and now it was but a shadow of all the adventure and chance of previous generations. First came the fall of cattle prices after the war, and then came the whole collapse of the Stock Market. Now in the era of Depression, it was all the lawlessness of the past, but their won fortune was not silver or gold …

But the very basic tools for surviving another month, week, or tomorrow.

The danger, the uncertainty, and the suffering seemed so distant from the fourteenth floor of the large brick building that was "The Hotel Texas" that commanded the southern view of Main Street. From where the pearly, golden haired, beauty had stood earlier that night, it seemed so far away. The sound of her world, a world she had only ever known, was the sound of clinking glasses, chuckles and giggles of curtsy, and the glimmer and glare of crystalline glass. Her green eyes had looked out at the glow of neon that cast shadows below, foreign strangers walking in and out of darkness, like lost souls wandering the cold caverns of this underworld of deco and Americana architecture. And in her heart she felt almost ashamed of herself, of her life, standing inside the grand ballroom of the grandest hotel in the State of Texas, if not in all of America.

Before her escape, the teenage princess, long tresses of golden hair flowing down her perfect porcelain back, had looked out at the crowded ballroom. The polished amber floor had been shimmering and reflective as a mirror. Tables crowded around the dance floor, had spotless white table cloths, and freshly picked flowers in sparkling crystal vases. Their shimmer was caught in the light from the hanging golden chandeliers above. The room filled with women in shiny and silky evening gowns, men in tux and tails. It was as diverse a crowd as she had ever seen, or been a part of. There were bearded men with sun burnt brown skin and turban, talking with big bellied old men, with tall, ten gallon, Stetson hats. There were women with bejeweled hairnets, old Duchesses with tiaras and sashes, and sun kissed younger women who wore silken sash to cover their hair. Texan, British, French, Arab, and Persian accents filled the ballroom that perforated with the sound of jovial 'Western Swing' from a group of men in cowboy hats, and burnt orange and white silk dress shirts with 'The Texas Playboys' stitched on their back.

There had been an untold amount of wealth within the very ballroom that overlooked the ghostly shadows of purgatory below where she found herself. And there was something deep within Marigold Crawley that made her feel disgusted. It wasn't that she wanted to be one of the desperate that passed her on the cold street. The struggle day to day for survival was evident on their gaunt and hard faces. It was a clear difference to the girl with a face as fresh and unblemished as a snowflake. But she didn't want to be up there either, with people who act like nothing was amiss in the decaying world around her. Not after what she had seen in the Texas border town and the tiny Mexican village of Dejalo, where they had just gotten back from. Even as emotional and sensitive as teenage girls could be when they felt something so strongly, Marigold knew that a few pounds couldn't help the poverty stricken people she had seen in their impromptu 'Wild West' adventure. But she didn't think it appropriate to attend such a lavish party so close between witnessing the very bottom of oblivion to living the very splendors of this Cattle Baron's Ball at the hotel. But there was nothing that could be done, and a part of her didn't blame Aunt Edith … Mama, for it either. They hadn't come here for the pleasure of society, as maybe her Aunt Mary or Aunt Rose might have. They were here for Uncle Tom's car business, which was now an extension of Downton. They needed Gasoline now to run cars, and these men had more than enough oil to change the future of all their lives. When they had told her several months before of their attendance, she might have thought it imperative. But after what she learned just yesterday, when she thought of Downton and its future …

There was only sorrow and heartbreak that might be the death of her.

They had all coveted the girl in the silvery evening gown of silk, creamy shoulders on full display, and a matching choker around her perfect pale neck. As she passed the guests, they were stricken with her. But on the street, the people seemed afraid to be even near her. A girl as fresh and beautiful as this, walking down the street in finery could only get someone in trouble for even talking to her. What could a foreign teenage princess have to say to a cast off that the police would ever believe? It made her self-conscious of her impromptu walk out of the ball.

Lady Mary had spent a fortune on Marigold and Sybbie's new wardrobes for the coming season. But their dress designer had called the girl his very muse. At the time, she had been excited by the prospect of a new wardrobe, a new style. It wasn't for her that she was reinventing herself, but for the one person that she wanted to be seen by. When _he_ would see her for the first time in so long, she wanted him to see a beautiful and sophisticated grown woman, fully formed, not the little girl that he'd only ever known. She wanted him to see her and know what waited for his return home after all these years. And it had been worth it all and more when he turned from the bar and saw her for that first time walking through those small, border town, Cantina doors. She'd never forget the shock, the vey love shown in his eyes as he took her in his arms in front of everyone and spun her around. She never wanted him to let go, wanted him to hold her like that forever. It was her fantasy, from the time she first saw the sketch on paper, to be wearing this gown in that very ballroom, while they waltzed to the fiddles twang. But now as she floated across the cold dark street, her prized gown covered by a long flowing velvet coat, it all felt so empty. All her fantasies, all her dreams, the very future she saw for herself had been stolen from her.

It was all in one foul swoop of a truth, finally revealed after fourteen years of life, that her world was over.

She couldn't stand it anymore, sitting there watching, her eyes following the movement of the dancing figures, and in particular the figure of a handsome woman with a beaked nose and creamy complexion. Her golden dress and elbow gloves matched her eyes and pinned down locks. Lady Edith, Marchioness of Hexham, looked perfect to Marigold as she waltzed across the room in the arms of her brother. Tom Branson still looked uncomfortable in these settings, and it was safe to say that the Irishman would never find a home in it. But he stood out even more by the yellowing bruise on his jaw and his swelled black eye. Marigold felt horrible for her Uncle Tom, he had it the worst of all in their cross border adventure. She had been so terrified when he had been kidnapped by Mexican bandits, that she couldn't have even imagined how Sybbie felt. She had been oh so grateful that her hero and her mama had rescued him. Even in her sorrow she was content to see him well and even smiling again in closed company of foreign, but strangely enjoyable music. There was a comfortable closeness of friendship and deep family connections between Edith and Tom that created a net of safety and privacy, even in a crowded room.

Yet, Edith wasn't smiling, and there was no mistake of happiness in her face. But there was a relief, a sense of weight being off her shoulders. She looked unburdened after fourteen years of lies and secrets. But where the secret had been in her heart there was now a pitted void of nothing to replace it. She thought love, understanding, and a true happiness would take its place. What she got was sobbing denials and pleading for it not to be true. For the rest of her life, Edith would never forget her daughter falling to her knees at her feet, hugging her legs, begging for her to tell her that it wasn't true. She had fled Marigold's hotel room in tears as the girl lay curled up in a ball in the middle of the floor, sobbing hysterically. Not in a million years had the middle daughter of the House of Grantham thought that was what would happen when she finally told the girl she loved more than life that she was her real mother.

It was so close to breaking Marigold to meet eyes across the room with the one woman she loved more than anything in the world and know that she had wounded her near mortally. But she couldn't tell her, couldn't tell anyone why the revelation had shattered her very soul. It should've been the happiest day of her life. If fate, destiny, or even God was fair, it would've been. But alas by giving her half her heart's desire, the most fundamental answer that any child asks about their past, she had lost everything. Fore knowing who she was meant that she could never be who she knew she was in her heart. To be what was promised to a depressed little girl so many years ago under a Coney Island pier one perfect evening by the sunset on a salty sea. It wasn't the title she mourned, the gift of status to call her own. It was that she couldn't be his, that he couldn't love her anymore. They could not love one another in the way they had all of their lives.

Her whole life, her whole future, was stolen by her very own conception.

There was nothing worst in the world than the sheer pain in her chest as she moved down Main Street of a foreign city. The rolling motor of cars, the clops of horse hoofs, and the tapping of feet on pavement was the symphony that played over the tragedy that had befallen her entire existence. Marigold didn't know what to do with all of that was inside her. She thought that there might have been emptiness, an abyss like she had heard and read so many times before of people with broken hearts. But there was nothing of the sort. Her heart was filled with all the old emotions, old feelings, and old attachments that hadn't left. There was no way to get rid of them, no way to evict them from who she was. The sentimentality of every flicker of happiness still lived on, even in the light of impossibility, in the damned confines of their reality. It was all still there, there to torment her, to taunt her. And she didn't know how to get rid of this love that was seared onto her very heart. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. The very memories filled her veins with a sweet poison that killed her with the very shards of her broken heart. In her mind she knew that it was over.

But in her heart and soul she was forever still his.

Marigold didn't know how long she had been walking, it didn't seem so far away from "Hotel Texas" to where he said he'd meet her. But trapped in her sorrow and in the darkest of places in her mind, it seemed like forever. Her rich velvet coat, silken ball gown and gloves, and long golden locks were illuminated by bright neon signs and glowing marquees of Fort Worth's main drag. The softest of flurries shadowed against the bright lights of Downtown as snow began to select its melting spots carried on a frigid northwestern wind. Chatter and music from the dives and restaurants echoed onto the street. Neon symbols and words were reflected onto automobile hoods and in the dark eyes of passing horses. The onset of the evening festivity of the hustler, downtrodden, and workers of the night seemed to overwhelm Marigold. Combined by the sheer sorrow inside her, the chaos and noise seemed to swirl about it, creating a dizzying fog of movement amongst the wet tingle of melted snow on her face.

But then, there was something in the sound of a fiddle playing that cast a line out to her. She wasn't sure why it drew her, but maybe that in her sorrow and the swirl of the unfamiliarity of the city, it was the sweetness of the music that attracted her. Just a taste of softness surrounded by the harshness of a hard and unrelenting world that was not her own. And when she found the source, she paused to watch. In front of the Jewelry store, in a stone building with a castle like architecture and a covered storefront, was a group of vagabonds. Some were white, some were Hispanic, and one was black, but all were in rags. They wore cobbled together clothing that was patched and torn, old coats, old hats, and old trousers. A black fiddle case sat in front of them as they played. The hard years of poverty, fear, and starvation were on their faces as they played such a sweet melancholy that reflected their circumstances and appearance. It was not for the love of it, or for the profession, but for the hopes that it would earn them enough money to eat something tonight and something to start off for tomorrow. With such beautiful music bathing over her, the thought that she had left her purse and money at the hotel, nearly brought Marigold's to tears.

Suddenly there was a flick of metal and the clink of a coin being flipped. A silver dollar spun through the cold air and landed with a rattle in the black case. The music nearly stopped for a bated breath when all the starving musicians turned in stunned shock. A single dollar could feed them for a week, maybe even two. Marigold turned with the rest of them to see a solitary figure leaning against a clock at the edge of the crosswalk. He wore an old brown outback fedora that was pulled over his eyes. A weather beaten homemade navy blue scarf was looped snuggly against the cold. A dark brown corduroy jacket with mended scars and patches, held together with taught Lady's Maid stitches, was buttoned over the scarf. His rugged black pants were stained and worn, and his tall supple boots were nearly coming apart at the soles. He was every bit as ragged and makeshift as the 'old timey' band, but he didn't bat a dark blue eye at parting with the coin.

The youth simply tipped the brim of his hat in salute to them and their talent.

His was a face that had seen just as much hard times as anyone there. Even in one so young had tragedy and circumstance taken him far from home. But within all of the sorrows, smiles, and tears, it hadn't broken the teenage boy who could still appreciate beauty, even in the hardest of circumstances. There was a dimmed light in his eyes as he returned his stare back at a small pediatric vile in his hand. Marigold felt a wave of sympathy and compassion in the cold and snow, watching him stare at the medicine vile. She had almost forgotten how much he hated the cold, hated the snow, hated Christmas lights … all in the dark memories he associated with them.

Feeling that he was being watched, the teenage boy kissed the vile gently and slipped it in his jacket's inner pocket. But when he looked up from their meeting spot, all the sorrow and memories of a fateful Christmas Eve morning went away when he spotted her from afar. There was nothing but love, nothing but longing in the enchanted look he had given Marigold when he saw her from afar. In the lights, in the sparkling shimmer of downtown traffic, it created an ethereal hue that was caught in the girl's golden tresses, creating a crown of light around her head.

And coming out of his painful revelries, George Crawley stared at Marigold as if she were an angel.

A deep pain ran the length of the girl's chest. Everything that had been tormenting her had gone away for just a split second under the stare that meant everything. All of her life, there had only been one person who could make her feel that she was special, that she was worth something. Lady Edith did everything she could to love her, Lady Grantham always told her she was special, but no one could quite encapsulate everything beautiful and perfect about Marigold as George could in just one look. And it was the one thing she'd have to give up tonight.

A wave of sadness fell over misting eyes in the jovial glare of holiday lights. In one glance she saw the very future that they had only three more years to wait for, and felt it slip away to the chorus of an old waltz that echoed off the stone and glass around them. All the happiness, all the smiles, all the love, and the happily ever after that waited for them seemed to go out with the tide and there was nothing left in the back wash but the flashes of a few shards of broken dreams too incomplete to remember anymore.

George strode forward and with no hesitation took her in his strong arms. His jubilee at seeing her was shown when he lifted her off her feet and spun her around the snowy street bathed in neon shadows. All she wanted to do was forget yesterday and be his again when he leaned down and kissed the girl deeply on her lips. He drank in all her beauty, all the purity and goodness that she represented in his hard and dangerous world. Even in the capture of their passionate kiss, Marigold envied the boy. George Crawley was still kissing his Aunt's orphaned ward, a girl he had been in love with since the day she arrived in the nursery of Downton Abbey.

And with all of her soul, that girl wanted to be just that again.

When they broke apart, George chuckled with a big grin of pure joy. His world was rough, his surroundings even rougher over the last several years. It wasn't every day that he kissed a beautiful girl, especially one that had meant everything to him. When there was something soft, pure, and good in this hard country, she was something to be cherished.

It had only been a day and a half since they had last seen one another. While the rest of his family had stayed at the "Hotel Texas" George stayed above a saloon at the Stockyards. As a marquee horse racer for the Diamond Team, he was responsible for his quarter horse, Wildfire. His aunt had tried to persuade him to let them stay with him there, his Uncle Tom insisting that they could "Rough it" but George flat out refused to allow them. The Stockyards of Depression stricken Fort Worth was a very rough and unpleasant place filled with desperate and villainous creatures. It certainly was no place for a titled Lady of the British Peerage, or two teenage beauties who were raised and cultivated in the drawing rooms of Downton Abbey. If the incident at the border was any indication, the life, people, and characters that George had come to befriend and grow accustomed too since running from New York was perhaps more dangerous than even he realized till now. They certainly weren't the type that any Earl of Grantham had invited to the Downton dinner table before.

It was a life that would follow him back to Downton with the news that his Grandmother Isobel was very ill. After seven years of ignoring demands from Granny, Donk, and his Aunt Edith for George to come home, the famed speedster didn't hesitate to sell his noble steed to a kind hearted rancher who had fallen on hard times. Come hell or high water, he'd be at his Grandmother's side when she needed him.

Marigold closed her eyes soothingly as he ran his cold chapped hand through her golden tresses, resting it on the warm base of her pale neck. When she opened them there was a smile of contentment that was tainted with heartbreak that was clearly on her lovely face as her eyes met his. The ghost of the very sadness of existence reflected back at him.

"What's wrong?" He gave a winded chuckle, suddenly out of breath under his angel's gaze.

Opening her mouth to speak, the girl's words were caught in her throat. There was only the squeak of hesitation before an audible sob escaped. "Oh George …" She whispered brokenly as she buried her face into his chest. She could smell the strong soap he used to clean his clothes, but there was still the whiff of horse to it. She hadn't minded. There was something about the smell of horse that had reminded her of Downton, of home … or was it home that reminded her of him?

The young man frowned, wrapping her up tightly in his arms. In the background a sad fiddle played a lonesome solo to the wind. He was controlled, keeping it light, but underneath it all he was frightened. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up and his gut was teetering at the edge of a cliff. He knew that his Aunt Edith had something important to tell her. It had been some truth that had been brought on by their near death experience in Dejalo and on the border. Sometimes George forgot that for people like his Aunt, Uncle, Marigold, and even Sybbie, getting thrown into the action, Ex-Mexican Revolutionaries led by an old Turkish Princess's Assassin trying to kill you, was not a normal thing for normal people. And the shock of being just a couple of days in George's world had shaken something loose from his Aunt Edith that she could no longer keep silent.

There was a part of him that knew what it was about. He had tried to tell himself that worst case scenario his Mother had murdered a noble couple who upstaged her and that his Aunt took in their daughter out of guilt. But George, sadly, wasn't stupid. He began to notice for some visits now the way they both acted similarly in social situations. They both shook their heads slightly when they spoke in distress, frowned with their mouth open when they were perplexed. He had been willing to chalk that up as picking up the personal ticks of a woman who raised her, who she was so close too. It was all he could do to convince himself when they came down the stairs together, same hair style, same make up from Madge.

It would've been so obvious to him if he had ever been home in eight years.

Wet sprits of snow dusted them as they clung to one another, trying hard to avoid the unspoken finish of their bliss. Squeezing his eyes shut, the boy nuzzled Marigold's ear and breathed hard. He tried to push the threat to everything he had left of an old life, to all his future plans away. It had to be something else that was bothering her. It could've been a thousand other things.

"Hey …" George broke apart from the girl. "I promise I'll come home this time." He nodded. "Marigold look at me." George tipped the girl's head up gently so that her tear strewn eyes would focus only on him. "I know you're disappointed that I won't be there for Christmas …" He felt his strength falter as the hurt intensified in her eyes. "But …" He breathed emotionally. "But I have some business in New Orleans before I go home. I have a promise to keep." His voice had the ghost of vengeful intention with a cultist preacher and his white hooded followers who murdered an old woman and her colored staff in her own plantation for a hidden family jewel worth a fortune. He nodded. "A promise I made to Granny …" He started.

It was the word of association, the title given to someone they both loved, an ancestor, the matriarch of a family. It was all she had to hear to make Marigold start to cry. Her tears covered by the thickening snowfall on the early December night. They might have found a way to bury it away, put it off, each trying hard to find a way around it. But at the the mention of the one person, the one woman, responsible for the very breath they took and emotion that tore them apart in that moment, it couldn't be avoided. Marigold looked away with a sob, staring at their reflection in the window.

What she had come for was the hardest thing she would ever have to do in her entire life. Not because of the truth used to carve her out of him forcibly by the laws of God, man, and nature, but because she didn't know how to do it. There was no way available, nor a helpful guide to this task. It was for the same reason that she suffered so … because, she did not want him to let her go. It was hard to imagine a life, a future without him, without her by his side. But the truths, the impossibilities, could not be overcome. There had been so many forbidden loves, so many star-crossed romances that littered text, film, and scattered through the earth. Stories when all the odds could be overcome by the sheer love that two people had for one another. But Marigold knew that this was one relationship that no deep love, intertwining souls, could save. For it was doomed by the fundamentality of it from the moment both their mothers had been born.

When she turned back there was a heart broken resignation on her angelic face. "George …" She whispered with a look of devastation. Her voice twisted around falling snow and carrying through the traffic of violin and guitar music to reach George with certain finality that shattered his world. It was all he needed to hear to understand, to know, the truth of everything he had been afraid of since Mexico.

"No …" He shook his head. "No, it's not … not possible." He backed away. "How can it be true? It's not true!" He bargained a non-negotiable position with fate, with himself.

But he knew it was.

It wasn't disgust, wasn't revulsion that overcame them. It was a mortal wound that would never heal. But for the same shared reasons and that was that nothing had changed. In the truth hidden from them for so long, in the secret relationship that no one knew of but themselves, they still loved one another as if nothing was amiss. But now, there was no path, no happy ending that the two cast outs of society had been planning. It was their wedding in the autumn with her perfect silk gown, the nights and mornings at Crawley House, and of course children. One by one, each dream fell way in the empty future years that would keep them apart.

"I'm so … so sorry." She sobbed, while the crystal flakes caught in the net of her golden hair. It wasn't her fault and yet she couldn't help but feel it was. They had been so happy, so filled with longing for one another through the anguish of being a part for so long. But they had always had their plans, their dreams, and the promise of one another on the right day in the right year. They had always known who he was, who his mother was, and his father. It had been Marigold who hadn't a soul in the world, a mystery. She had always been content to have Lady Edith, to have Sybbie, and to always have George. But she felt all of this heart ache had been her own doing, for it was her and her mysterious origins who had caused all of this pain. Now she wondered, after all the secrets and sadness that perforated the fourteen years of her life …

If she had never been born, would everyone not have been happier?

A sudden rush of desperation came over the rugged teenager who stood in shock. "We can still do this." He took steps towards her. His eyes filled with hurt and pain even as he forced a hopeful tone. It was the same voice he used to use when they were young. A small girl sitting in the corner in tears after a round of bullying from the other high born children not interested in sharing with an orphaned bastard. Her only salvation, her only moment of self-worth, was a boy who walked her down to Crawley House. His encouraging tone telling her how great his day was gonna be now that she was gonna spend the rest of it with him. But no amount of Mrs. Patmore's cake in the kitchen, encouragement from Mrs. Crawley, or strange and highly inappropriate advice from Denker could fix this.

But it didn't stop George from trying.

"We can do this, Marigold … please!" He called after her when she shook her head. The young man cupped her cheek so she could look into his eyes. "We can run away together, when the time comes, we can pack up and get lost out here. Be someone else, disappear. I know how, I know where … remember, no Marigold, remember that little spot in San Antonio, the one by the river with the Blue Bonnets. You said you'd like to live out there, we can do that! I can make that happen for us!" He was almost hysterical, fumbling with his stream of consciousness, desperately trying to talk to the same girl who all their lives would've followed him to Hell and back.

Her satin gloved hands cupped his, buried in her hair. "It wouldn't change anything, George. We'd still be …" She couldn't bring herself to say it. Say the one word that hung over the lovers like a witch's curse. "And what about Lord and Lady Grantham? You're the last, best, hope for Downton. There's no one else, no more distant relatives, you're the last. Can you really let everyone down? Can _we_ leave them all behind?" She asked him.

A flame of anger, of hatred, was lit from that day forward. The moment that an old man's legacy, a collection of crumbling stone and frozen pipes, was used as leverage against his heart's true desire in the love of a golden haired angel lit by neon and shimmering in fallen snow. "I don't give a _fig_ about all that! I care about you! _**I love you**_!" there was not a more sincere word spoken in his frothing breath. Hearing the admission, Marigold's eyes lightened, her lip quivered. It was a phrase that she didn't hear often, and it was something she never took lightly when spoken to her. She leaned forward and kissed him hard. There was a deep sadness and even deeper love in the way they came together as the snow swirled around them and the music of tired and hungry vagrants played the last song of the night.

They kissed with all of their emotion and might, knowing that it would be for the last time.

When they broke apart, Marigold's face was awash with tears. With a sniffle she placed her forehead against George's. Closing her eyes she let all of their happiest and intimate moments of friendship and romance crowd around them. "I can't, George, I couldn't do that to them." She shook her head. "I'm so sorry." She wiped his eye with her gloved hand. She kissed his cold cheek. "I love you." She whispered in his ear, taking his hand. "I'll always love you. For as long as we live, I will always love you. I'll always love you!" She repeated in a whispered sob, pleading for him to remember as she nodded.

"And I'll always be here … waiting." George whispered with the last shred of hope that he clung too, that they both did. "I'll wait forever." He promised.

A sputtered cry left Marigold at the relentless young man who was still fighting for her, even when there was nothing left to fight for. It was too much to bear, too hard to stand there and hear everything she had ever wanted to hear, from the one person she had only ever wanted. She slowly backed away, their hands still intertwined as their connection slowly grew taut. Finally their hands came apart. For a long moment they stood on the snowy sidewalk as the world passed them by without giving a single glance. Then, in tears, the most beautiful girl in the world turned and walked back to her hotel, leaving George standing all alone on the snowy street.

For a long time the ragged teen stood in the middle of the sidewalk. Watching the place where Marigold had once stood. His entire frame felt is if he carried the world on his shoulders, so many memories, so many plans, so many fiery sunsets hand in hand, and nowhere for them to go. He stood and pondered the irony and tragedy of the two sisters. They were two women, who spent most of their lives hating one another, one with a boy and the other with a girl. Then, somewhere between their endless squabbles, right under their noses, their two children fell in love without knowing the truth. It seemed like a crueler joke that had he only listened to one of his Mother's fundamental warnings about his aunt, he could've been saved.

Lady Edith Crawley Pelham, daughter of the Earl of Grantham and Marchioness of Hexham, would always break your heart, because, she had never gotten a thing right in her entire life.

With a splatter that had gotten heavier, the slow snowfall disappeared. Plucking George's worn jacket, his hat brim, and the sidewalk. An icy rain began to fall on the old streets of Downtown Fort Worth. His frothing breath was visible in the downpour as he waited for some absolution or the girl of his dreams to lose her senses and come running to him, but neither would ever come. Motor engines and horses echoed dimly bellow the smoke rings of the dowsed flames of a happy future that drifted into the dark of the night. Slowly, placing his hands in his jack pocket, George turned and walked away. The train to Newport was leaving in the morning. It was the beginning of a final adventure that would end in New Orleans where the fulfillment of a promise and danger were waiting for him. But in the end did it really matter?

Did anything matter anymore?

There was a show of grateful respect from the musicians, planning on the first breakfast in two days, when they removed their hats in the sorrowful youth's passing. When he was gone, they excitedly put away their instruments and moved in unison away. But as they cleared, a spectator remained. He wore a tuxedo for the Cattle Baron's Ball cover from the cold by a _double breasted, mahogany colored leather jacket_. A British Bayonet at Gallipoli had taken his left eye that was covered by a black patch, and an Australian Cavalryman in Palestine had given him his pink scar that ran from temple to jaw. Slowly, the man began to follow the last heir of the House of Grantham back to the Stockyards.

From his leather coat pocket he drew an ancient dagger once carried by the personal body guards of the Ottoman Royal Family.

* * *

 _ **Now**_

The stilled chill of the air settled around the lonesome figure that was shadowed by candle light. In the flickering glow of the lantern that sat next to him, in the reflection of the glare, he could see the halo around Marigold's head. When he closed his eyes the girl he loved was still standing on the wet, snowy, street. She shimmered in her glamorous aesthetic that only enhanced everything fine and perfect that God had a personal touch in making. Her long golden locks caught in the frigid winds of winter, fluttering and flowing to one side like the most perfect banner. All these years later she was still crying, still nuzzled to his chest, holding onto him for dear life, holding onto their dreams. It had been almost five years now and he could still almost touch her, as if she was standing right in front of him. But when he opened his eyes … she was gone. And all that was left was an old emptiness that he could never fill.

In the background a scratchy record played on a gramophone. An Irish tenor was singing to millions of people, forming their own attachments and memories to his flowery words. George wondered how many people had shed a tear or two to his velvet voice and sentimental tone. But for the young man, the Irishman was only a poor replacement for a ragged band of drifters playing for food at the corner of Main Street. The final song of the night as two lovers clung to what never was and parted as family. The tenor was playing to the home crowd, pandering to the consumer. The vagabonds' music had a tone of desperation, a perfection that was only for themselves, for their survival. And for George, that was what it was with anyone else, with any other girl that wasn't Marigold. He was playing to the common denominator, pandering to normalcy. But for a ragged young man, millions of miles from home, the love he had for his angel was sheer desperation. She had been all he had, all he lived for some days … she had been his survival. He had thought once that she could save him. That loving her could've made up for every dark thing he had done. As long as Marigold had still loved him, there was still something worthwhile about himself to be found. She had been all George had ever wanted, and this place, these people, had taken her away from him. And now that she was gone …

It was getting harder to find reasons to get up in the morning after almost five years.

He could still remember the last time he had saw her, on his birthday. The last time they had talked before that was the night he had left for Palestine. She had begged him not to go, not to leave everyone again. He remembered the words that pounded his heart like a battering ram against a gate. He seemed half mad when he had grabbed her by her arms and shook her. He asked her, begged her to give him one reason to stay. She was crying, because what they wanted didn't matter anymore, all the reasons to remain were gone. Marigold had wanted George to stay, wanted him near her, but that was all they would be, near one another. She went down to dinner that night and cried into her Aunt Rose and Uncle Atticus's chests in the library. She couldn't have born to run to anyone else, any other relation would only make the pain worse. Her mama was his aunt. Her aunt was his mother, her granny and grandfather, was his as well. Everything in Downton was a reminder of the doom, of the impossibility of their love for one another.

When he was gone she lay in bed for days, crippled by sorrow. No one knew who the girl's young man was, only that he had left her a year prior, and everyone believed that George leaving only reminded Marigold of the heartbreak of her first love. Her mama lay over her, whispering into her ear that life was tough, but so was Marigold, and when she came through it, she'd be a stronger person. But she didn't want to be tough, didn't want to be strong. She only wanted her 'Someone' back again, believing that she'd never see him again.

And then she had come through those bar doors in York, four years later, with her most enchanting dress, and in her most perfect female form. She had been fifteen when he left, not a girl, but not quite a woman. Beautiful, but still forming, shaping, a flower only half bloomed. But when he saw her after four years, he wanted to die. She was a woman grown now, pearly satin from bust to toe. She was perfectly pure as a snow flake on a clean winter's morning. She had been more than his wildest imagination of what he had expected her to be. He had heard that Marigold had moved on, dated a few young Eton chaps, a regular at prestigious Oxford dinners. She had become a world renown Prima Ballerina, whose skill, passion, elegance, and unsurpassing beauty became the draw of the Royal Ballet Company. Her performances had been a staple of the London Season. And if that hadn't made her popular enough, her mother had given her a column in 'The Sketch' giving advice to young teenage girls. The often bullied and belittled girl had a therapeutic voice on paper for like minded girls in her situation. With being a famed ballerina and young columnist, the crowning achievement was being the basis for a book series that Lady Edith wrote about a young heroine that many young girls on both sides of the Atlantic worshiped. In four short years Marigold Crawley had become the hero of every girl in Brittan and New York. But when she spotted him sitting there, with Sybbie holding him in his seat, he felt her heart call to him, felt her soul reach out over the roaring mockery she had become too used too in her life. All these years and nothing had changed.

Their hearts and souls were still filled with a hundred lifetimes of loving each other.

When the party went into full swing, the gaff forgotten in a dozen other ruckuses of youth celebrating lives that could end tomorrow, they had come together. George had felt quite inferior to this professional, career oriented, beauty. She was the darling of every little girl in the civilized world. She was a hero, best friend, and big sister to every trouble teenage girl in England. George was a racing pilot, who had spent the last four years drinking, fighting, adventuring, and flying his way across the colonial mid-east, making enemies of Nazi, Jihadi, Sheik, and Sultan of half a dozen countries and kingdoms. And he had nothing to show for it but a short movie serial taken of a race around a Crusader castle, a few war medals, and a tally of dead Nazi pilots under his cockpit. It seemed that their broken dreams had been reformed into two different paths. One, the progressive fame of iconic status, and the other, a rootless existence of danger and excitement that tried to fill a void left when she walked out of his life.

They had traded stories over drinks. They talked of innocent memories of nursery and downstairs. They laughed at the fun and the sweetest of victories won in 'The Nursery Rebellion' so many years ago. Marigold was addicted to the stories of adventure and mystery that George and sometimes Sybbie had lived. And both exchanged notes on the trying and interesting experience of having Sybil Branson as a roommate. Both agreeing that George had it worst, having been forced to share not only quarters, but a cot with the shameless, uncouth, young woman they loved every night.

But as the evening came to a close, the crowd thinned out, and Sybbie passed out. George and Marigold seemed to be the only ones left standing. Somehow they had found themselves alone in the bar, dancing as the world grew still. There had been nothing but themselves and the music that seemed to obey their every command. It was the best moment of his life … and the worst mistake he had ever made. As they danced, he remembered everything that he had tried so hard to move on from. In some other time and place, in another world, they'd be dancing together as well. But in that world it would've been as husband and wife. As they waltzed, even as the music ended, the love sick girl asked about what it would've been like … what their wedding would've been like. They were suddenly tormented in the revelry of plans that would've had them married by now. He should've walked away then, but just like all those times together at Crawley House and Gardens of Downton, he got lost in their fantasy world.

By the end, they had stopped dancing. They were just standing in the middle of the floor, holding one another. The country was in ruins, the world was on fire, and George was a war hero to a losing side, and the heir to a dead way of life. When everything was breaking down around them, they had found each other, and yet, could never have one another. All that was theirs in those few precious hours together was childhood fantasies that they had talked to death and that they could only pretend they were living. Back then they were explorers, soldiers in the Foreign Legion, and Archeologists. Now, it was as Count and Countess of Grantham, it was as Mr. and Mrs. Crawley, and it was simply as a boy and girl with a future together. It was just one more beautiful lie in a life filled with fruitless longing for a love doomed and damned by every convention known to them before they ever knew the truth that damned it.

As the sun began to rise, it had been time to go. There was a war to fight, a column to write, and a control room to man. So many people relied on them, and yet it didn't seem to mean anything when they were in one another's arms. But it was Marigold who broke first, as it usually was. She'd throw herself into her work, to convention. Someday she'd have a ballet company and inherit her mother's magazine that gave her fame. She'd meet a nice man that her mother and the rest of the family liked, that had such grand ideas, and he'd love her. Their children would be smart, beautiful, and perfect. It was a life that sad girl had earned, a life Marigold deserved. As for George Crawley, he would still be waiting, waiting for the summer sky to change pink, for the sun to rise in the west and set in the east. Each day he'd sit in a crumbling crypt of all the glorious splendors of yesterdays, and after a hundred years, a hundred lifetimes, still think today might be the day reality would change.

For her … he'd wait forever.

As he watched her go, just for a moment he was back on a snowy and sleeted Fort Worth street corner. Each time he had nothing to say to her, nothing to offer to make her come back to him. He was forever destined to watch the only woman he would ever love walk away. He could still see her long tresses of golden hair disappearing in the distance even as he sat on his barstool, staring into the shadows. He took his mostly empty glass of whiskey and stared at it as the song ended one last time.

"Maybe tomorrow …" He said into the sudden empty silence around him. With a tilt, he knocked down the last of the golden liquid. He sniffed his way through the burning in his throat, and grunted when it was over. Slamming the glass back down, he poured himself a new one.

The Grantham Arms was deserted. The pub was dark and shadowy. The dampness of aged and rotting wood could be smelt in the moldy establishment. It had never been rebuilt, but it had gone through half a dozen renovations over the last three hundred and seventy five years. Though it should have been considered to be brand new with all the old boards and planks on the floor and the wall constantly being replaced, but the décor and design hadn't changed. There was still a whiff of a medieval tavern to it that had never truly gone away. It reflected everything wrong with the English, reflected everything wrong with the Crawley's and the rest of the Peerage in one glance. George had been in many saloons, Cantinas, taverns, and bars in his life. But the Grantham Arms was by far the dowdiest. Like everything about the British, they took pride in aged things, in their past. There was no Jubox. There was no dart bored, neon signs, or pool table. There was no future. It was everything that was wrong with this country, this goddamn way of life. The old farmers and their too young grandsons would rather dig their graves in the rubble of their sentimentality, than protect themselves from a Nazi V2 Rocket.

It almost made him feel like he was insane for even fighting for these people.

But then he shook his head and sighed. Laid out in front of him were the emptied out contents of his Jacket pockets, his most prized possessions he'd rather have on him when he died. A pediatric vile sat toward the back of the counter at the edge of a torn and tattered cloth unfolded in front of George. His father's medals were starting to tarnish in their exposure to dust and hot climate of North Africa and the Holy Land. A plastic package of cotton and a sewing kit, both taken from the dress shop, lay open next to him. Using the cloth with the medals pinned on it as a working station cover, George was carefully sowing the small stuffed Great Dame back together, using the Lady's Maid stitches that Anna Bates had taught him when he was a boy. In his detest for this place and these people, he found himself surrounded by the very things of his own past he was unable to let go of.

There was a flicker of shadow that passed the frosted window of the pub. He caught it in the corner of his eyes, but he didn't move. He simply continued to sew the little toy back together. There was the sound of boots scraping against the outside door. But George only stopped to down his glass of whiskey. As he knocked the glass back the door to the pub jangled and a tall, thin figure entered the barroom with heavy feet thumping against wooden floor boards. Frowning through the burning in his throat, the youth cleared it, and carefully filled the nearly stitched gut of the little animal with sinfully soft cotton. The figure stood tensed for a moment as he watched the man at the bar continue to work. Then, there was the tiniest of a hateful smirk on his face. There was something distinctive, disciplined, about his paces as he approached the bar.

"Open?" The man had just the hint of a foreign accent that protruded his English.

"Didn't stop me."

"Nothing does, does it Grantham?"

When the man came into the light, the collar of his grey uniform was soaked. His golden washed platinum hair was unkept, with one side of his part hanging limply over his ear. The fur lined leather coat was as black as midnight, with the hard smell of new leather perfuming his tall frame. His black swastika pinned on the large lapel of his coat had golden brass embroidery. There was something impeccably handsome about the Austrian aristocrat. His features were elegant and militaristic like the beauty of an ordinate saber on an ancient castle wall. The man leaned against the bar with the ease of arrogance causing George to look up.

"Wolf …" he greeted laconically, slowly reaching for his hip.

"Comet …" The man who killed Atticus Aldridge languidly reached inside his black coat for something.

There was a sudden tension in the room as two young men, two rivals, with so much hatred and history came face to face. They had traded blows and bullets, a series of almost and should've in running battles and unfinished duels in four years of bitter rivalry. In a dozen native cultures it was said that when two creatures spilled one another's blood, their souls were connected forever. There could be no mistake that each one had woken in a cold sweat from a nightmare, the same nightmare. A sightless abyss with a lit, single mirror at its center, and when they look into it, they see the same thing … each other. And now on a fateful night, on the last day of a battle for the last kingdom, the two men who had fought, who nearly killed each other that day, met face to face to settle a debt.

In a flash of lightning, the two men used the diversion to make their moves. In the corresponding rumble of thunder that shook the pub, they drew. George lifted his hand to show an open palm, while the Count flashed a large aluminum flask with a depiction of a medieval joust on its body. There was a pause from the two as the dust settled in the dark barroom. Then slowly two smirks grew into grins, before a smile came over them. The Nazi pilot offered his hand to the RAF Ace with a laugh.

"Good to see you, Grantham."

"How are you, Wulfric?"

The two chuckled, shaking hands firmly. There would be time for their final duel. But even in their hatred, there was something bred into them that gave pause for a moment of shared reflection of such glorious and fateful circumstance. In this dowdy, anachronistic setting, there was the very ghost of chivalry in the last two decedents of grand knights sharing a gentlemanly drink, before settling their prejudices in duel. It was the parting toast to two great houses, to their way of life, before they were nothing but accounts in controversial history text books.

The young pilot clapped a hand on the Count's shoulder and shook it as the blond pulled up a stool next to him. As he settled, he handed George the flask. Giving him a sly and suspicious frown, the youth unscrewed the Teutonic headed cap and sniffed the contents. There was just a look of good natured ribbing as he watched the Austrian take his glass and fill it with what George had been drinking.

"Schnapps?" He crowed disappointedly.

The Nazi took a hard draft of the Scottish Whiskey. "My mother's own … label." He coughed hard and looked at the glass. He pointed to the unmarked, used, wine bottle in quandary.

"My old housekeeper's brew." He raised his eyebrows.

The Count laughed in surprise. "With a recipe like this, must be an interesting woman." He finished his drink and coughed hard again.

"She didn't start making it, till after she got married." George had quirked a playful eyebrow.

At the tidbit the Nazi officer snickered in utter charm of the little village he wanted to burn to the ground with all of his blackened soul. "Isn't that the truth?" He reached over the bar and pulled a new glass. He bumped his fellow racer in the arm to take it.

George flinched in pain. There was a gash through the sleeve of his faithful double breasted leather jacket. Under it was a tight field dressing wrapped by a loving raven haired nurse while he was unconscious. The white bandage was wet and stained with blood. George covered his wound with a hand, flexing and rotating his arm with a wince.

"Damn it, Wolf, want to pour salt on it too?" He took a swig of Mrs. Hughes's whiskey for the pain, before slamming it down on the bar.

"Apologies …" The Nazi pilot took the flask in hand with a smug and self-pleasing smirk. When he poured the schnapps into the old whiskey glass, he seemed pleasantly curious.

"Where?" He motioned to the wound on the RAF Ace's arm.

George sneered. "The climb above Downton … you got me, the electrical, and my little dog too." He chuckled showing him his half stitched Great Dame that the Austrian Count had obliterated in battle.

There was an amused noise in the Cambridge educated man's throat. As he poured George's glass he pulled aside his own fur collar and exposed a pale neck. There was a deep gash crusted with blood and yellowish green pus just under the edge of his chin. "Tried to figure eight high to low, you broke high, came at my three o'clock, and sprayed me when I passed. Shattered my speedometer, the glass nearly cut my juggler." He covered his wound back up and pushed the glass toward his old adversary.

"Too bad …" George shook his head and took the glass.

There was a flash of hatred behind the aristocratic manner. "I can't say I share your sympathies. Though …" He picked up the stuffed dog by its foot with his thumb and forefinger, as if it was a disease riddled cast off. "I can claim this as a moral victory." He smirked as George snatched the item out of the man's hand.

"Could'a, should'a, didn't." The American heir to a British earldom toasted.

"Yes, quite …" The Count lifted his own glass.

After a clink, both men drank. There was a long pause while they gulped down the alcohol, staring at one another as they let the flavor wash over them. George nodded slowly with a grunt of approval of the English born and presented Dowager Countess's schnapps, as the aftertaste passed. Sighing out loud, the Count drummed on George's shoulder with an excited fist, and then smugly lounged back against the bar.

"Who would've thought …" The man looked at hung picture frames of the village of Downton's past on the far wall. "After Dunkirk, Eagle Day, and the raids on London, you and I, of all people, would still be here, at the end." There was something gleeful in his sharp eyes.

"Did you have any doubts?" George leaned over the bar, staring into his glass.

"Maybe one or two, a few close calls over the last few months." He leaned forward. But nothing that got me worried." He winked cheekily as he finished his drink.

"I wonder what they're gonna say in Berlin, when the Luftwaffe's best pilot was shot down by running into an English Castle …" He returned the same arrogance toasting him as he finished his drink.

There was something passive aggressive about the hospitality in the way The Wolf snatched the empty glass from his RAF counterpart. He poured more schnapps for him, an ambiguous smile on his face at the comment. "Yes …" he agreed. "Though I'd think they'd rather like to hear that I was shot down by the manor, than by its owner, no?" Von Montenuovo had a smarmy superiority as he filled his own glass.

Nodding with a smirk, the racer took the reloaded cup. "True enough … you already lost to me, twice." George cockily showed him two bragging fingers. "They'd never let you have another crack at getting into Eva Braun's blouse if they heard you made it a third time." He smiled through a draft.

The man glared. "Once … I lost once to you, sir. That business at Chevaliers doesn't count." He waggled his finger in chastisement as he grunted against the strong aftertaste.

George looked outraged at the denial of the most signature victory of his racing career. "Bull-fucking-shit, Montenuovo, you lost to me fair and square. If you need a memory jog look in the goddamn record books under "whipped your ass", you'll see my name." He challenged with the point of the finger with the hand that held his glass.

"I'll fully admit my defeat …" He swept his hand over his heart.

"Very big of you." There was annoyance in George's muttered voice.

"But to the real victor of that race. Lady Sybil Branson, your mechanic." He bowed.

George Crawley had never been more outraged in his life. "Syb … Sybbie?! In what planet do you live on, Wolf, in which Sybbie deserves credit for my speed records?!" He was half amused and half ready to incite the fight they both had been waiting to finish.

The man was almost chivalrous in his tone. "You forget, sir, that 'The Thunderfighter's' speed comes from your engineer's mechanical genius, these "special modifications" she made are what won you all those races. I dare say your mother could fly that racer, and win." He said with vitriol under a polite façade. He motioned his head to a poster behind the bar. The slim and perfect frame of Lady Mary Crawley looked sleek and beguiling in a red and white gown and black elbow gloves as she lounged against the hood of a shiny automobile. Her and Tom Branson's auto dealership name was in bold under the advertisement. It only made her son glare with a raised eyebrow, ironically something he picked up from her, unknowingly.

"Pshh …" George scoffed. "Save me the white knight carrying off the suffragette to the promise land, bullshit." He smirked grudgingly. "You just don't want to admit you ate my dust, they got it on film, and it got rave reviews at the World's Fair." George Crawley was without humility.

After her expulsion from university, Tom Branson and Lady Mary had sent Sybbie abroad in the hopes that a taste of the world might work out the wildness in the raven haired whirlwind of brains, beauty, and way too much spirit. They had all wanted to be angry with Sybbie, but all they could see was the prayers of Lady Sybil coming true for her girl in every wild action. It was a curse that Tom thanked every breath for. That was till he learned that she spent a few days sight-seeing in Paris before she disappeared. They were ready to send the Royal Marines when Lady Grantham got a telegram from George simply saying _**"She's with me"**_ and nothing else.

Sybbie had only stayed in Paris long enough to send a letter and receive one. She had asked where George would be in a two week period. He had answered, unassumingly, that he and several of the Hebrew landowners were rebuilding a racer they got from a British Junkyard outside of Tel Aviv and where hoping to enter it in the racing trials at Galilee. Without telling anyone, Sybbie traveled to Marseille. There she spent a night sipping wine by the Mediterranean and driving the boys mad. In the warm night of Southern France, her linin party dress caught in the sea breeze, she spent her solitude, away from the parties, thinking of her mother. Pondering everything she didn't know what to do with the life Lady Sybil gave hers for. And somewhere in that beautiful city, on a perfect night, she had made her decision.

A week later, she was one of the first passengers to land at the brand new Port of Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, George had been fighting and running from the Nazi SS detachment that had been chasing him since Spain. He had helped fund a dig for Crusader gold, and instead, pursuing a lead in _Spain_ , he had found something truly more precious than a chest of gold galleons. He would never speak of it, but to say that when word of what he had found spread, the German Cultural Ministry had chased him to Tripoli, before asking for cooperation from the British Foreign Office for custody of the item in the young Heir of Grantham's possession. Hugh "Shrimpy" MacClare, Marquis of Flincher did the best he could to stall them, but the British Governor of Egypt shared Nationalistic socialist sympathies. George was ambushed immediately, citing that he didn't have the proper paper work. The British Army imprisoned him, searched him, but found nothing. Since Shrimpy had secured his release the agents of the SS had been in pursuit for the item. It might have been the most important artifact ever found in the twentieth century, however, it seemed like a nice ornament to Cora Crawley who used her mysterious birthday present she got in the post to tie Downton's dining room together nicely. Every once in a while, a maid or a footmen could swear that they'd see it glow blue on its own in the wee hours of the night, but Mrs. Hughes would not hear of their silly nonsense.

In an attempt to shake Nazi agents, George hid in the Hebrew farming settlements in Palestine. He had been working at an air circus and earning money on the side by crop dusting. However, one day on his rounds, he came upon an attack on a farm by Nazi armed Arab bandits that were harassing the Jewish people of the Holy Land. Hoping to scare them off, George dove at them in his plane, using his revolver to pick them off. However, during his pursuit of the fleeing figures, he was shot down. When he woke up, he was confronted by the elders and landowners. They commended the young man on his bravery, and willing to defend the people of Israel, when others only turned a blind eye. They offered to compensate his only means of money making in exchange for the grandson of a British Earl to try and convince the Royal army to help them against the bandit hoard hiding in the desert.

However, the British Army was unwilling to help. Their Colonel could be persuaded, for a price. Putting their money together, it wasn't enough. However, while leaving headquarters, George saw a flyer for the speed trials at Galilee. Convincing them of another way to make up the difference, they went to Tel Aviv to see what they could find that was flyable. And somewhere in the back of a Royal Junkyard George had found a Howard Hughes designed concept racer. No one knew how the sleek, streamlined, and abandoned plane ended up this far out of the way. But it did, and it was his. Hauling it back to the settlements, they'd rebuild it somehow and use the race winnings from the British Colonial Cup at Galilee to buy protection for the suffering outlining settlements.

Sybbie had arrived out of nowhere, much to her misfortune. She spent a night in the hands of bandits looking to marry the rare beauty to their leader. Luckily she had escaped along with a young girl. Out in the desert they might have died in the sands had George and a few other young men not braved the wilderness to save them. They reached the girls just in the nick of time, fighting bandits off to get back to the settlements. For a week, Sybbie, who had a chance to find a life of pleasure and worth in the beauty of the French countryside, now fought dehydration and her whole body shutting down in a desert heat that an Irishman and Grand English Lady's daughter was not adapting too. But she was saved each night by the caring and love filled work of a soft spoken nurse that could've been her twin. She'd awaken each time calling after a woman that no one ever saw but her and George. She was a faceless Lady in White that they had forgotten almost as soon as she left both of them with a caring and love filled kiss.

When Sybbie was recovered, George had wanted to send her back to Europe, back to Downton. Her experience was but a taste of the Arab revolts in the region that was targeting Colonists and especially Jews. It was a dangerous time to be there. But Sybbie only reminded George that she was older than him, though he protested that it was a curve of seven months. Ignoring him, the determined girl showed him her sketches of the engine she had in mind for _**their**_ racer.

When they arrived in Galilee, many of the veteran British, French, and Jordanian pilots laughed at them. While 'The Thunderfighter' was an impressive, futuristic, American machine, its pilot and especially its engineer were not. While George certainly looked the part, nine years of adventure and journeying trough Depression America and North Africa had left him rugged beyond his years. Sybbie, however, stood out like a sore thumb to their rugged and dirty surroundings. The absurdity of a woman mechanic was not foreign in the frontiers of the Empire. But a 'Lady' engineer was. Lady Mary's influence over her niece/daughter was apparent in the sleek and snappy dresses of the fashion tailors of Regent Street that the girl wore on racing day. If having a Lady mechanic wasn't eccentric enough, it was the fact that the veteran pilots of The Great War were being challenged by eighteen and seventeen year old kids, Bush League amateurs. But to the cat calls and taunting, Sybbie merely flicked open her stylish sunglasses and put them on coldly.

George had been nervous, though he had never admitted it. He had only flown test runs in clear skies, and there was a whole town and adjoining farmers depending on him. If he had screwed this race up, they'd all be in the lurch … and he'd be dead. They felt their age for a moment as George and Sybbie talked before takeoff. George had done plenty of stupid and dangerous things in America, but with Sybbie with him this time, he felt like a small child. When one is young and alone, they never think twice about things, but when with family, there was old baggage to be carried. In truth, George had felt like they should be waiting for Donk and Granny, Aunt Edith, Uncle Tom, and dare he say, his own mother to come and take control of the situation. He might have had second thoughts if it wasn't for the fashionable girl who snapped him out of it. He had watched Sybbie kiss the little Great Dame and then hold it out for him to do the same. Afterwards nothing else mattered when they slid the cockpit closed, nothing but winning.

An accusation of bias and publicity stunting by the British Government was leveled by the Jordanian Royal family and the French teams when the Thunderfighter and its teenage pilot not only won the race, but set the speed record. British mechanics leveled the conspiracy of the aristocracy rigging the game, as usual. No one could believe that the American flyer engineered by the Granddaughter of a Count and Countess could win. It was an excuse of conspiracy that would continue as they were offered a place in the Colonial Circuit. Splitting profits with the Jewish Landowners who sponsored George, they used their profits to move the 33rd Arsuf Rifles into the settlements. Meanwhile, George and Sybbie followed the circuit where their Cinderella story was supposed to be squashed by the famed Nazi racers and their impeccable German machinery at Alexandretta.

They were still waiting.

It was said, not for the first time, some months after George's return to Downton, by an exasperated Sarah Bunting that George and Sybbie were bad for one another. It was a fact that no one could deny from the time they were able to walk that the two were always on the run. When they got together, especially as teenagers in Downton, the two were good at having fun in all the wrong ways. Bar fights, rolling Henry's old car in a Ripon street race, and terrorizing Lady Mary's suitors, and Tom Branson's girlfriend Sarah Bunting. It was much the same in Egypt and Palestine.

Later they'd agree that their travels, dangers, and adventures together were the best days of their lives.

A year later the two were on a high that they thought they'd never come down from in Cairo, after winning the Colonial Championship Cup. That was till George was ambushed by a Swordsman in the Bazar. When the youth had checked the dead body, after Sybbie had thrown a snake charmer's cobra at the assassin, he thought he'd find German Marks … instead he found Turkish gold. He could only guess what Shrimpy had wanted to talk to him about when he asked to meet him in Jerusalem. There was a depression that overcame George. He knew he'd have to let Sybbie go. She had ridden the high of their victories, _loving the open road_ and traveling to exotic places to do what she loved with her best friend in the whole world. But, he knew the violence that followed him wherever he had went, was starting to become a threat to her. He had gotten used to having family and a best friend by his side, but he loved her too much to keep risking her life, especially if the dusty old Ottoman Princess was serious this time.

"The Sultan of Swing" was where he and Shrimpy usually met. The club and tavern for pilots, smugglers, adventurers, and or anyone that wanted to avoid the Royal Army was in the Old Quarters of Jerusalem. It was a haven for disreputable and villainous creatures of every race, creed, and belief, just as much as it was filled with the most loyal of friend. There was a strange hollowness in the pit of one's stomach at the smell of smoke and opium that greeted you at the beaded front entrance. Behind the laughter and enjoyment of strong drinks of harsh desert distilment and smoke rings from hookahs, was the strange melding of Sitar, Arabic horn, and contemporary jazz that was perforated throughout the dark tavern. The way the music clung to your ear, with the strange and purposefully filthy way the overweight woman dressed as an ancient Egyptian queen sang it, gave an unsettling feeling. It was like the slow drizzling of spoiled honey. The sweetness flavored from the alluring noises of the obnoxious singer's back-ups, three desert roses garbed in sexualized Egyptian slave girl costumes. Their lives and stories put a bit of grime on them that was alluring. The whole joint made you want to bathe, preferably with one of the enchanting and alluring belly dancers that glistened in sweat and oil as they moved to the filthy music throughout the crowded barroom, looking for paying customers.

The minute George and Sybbie swaggered inside there was an assortment of scars, eye patches, swastikas, and weapons on full display. Somewhere between the sweaty, rippling, flesh of silky belly dancers, clouds of pink hookah smoke overhead, and the unsettling music, one could imagine that any mother who had been born and raised in the wholesome confines of Downton Abbey would've thought they had descended into a circle of hell.

At the usual back table was Shrimpy Flincher, the old gentlemen, who was trying to politely deny service to the overweight singer, rubbing her gut into his whiskered cheek as she serenaded him. Sybbie didn't miss a chance to make jokes of the situation. The Marquis was patiently annoyed at the jovial and mocking encouragement to the man from George about "taking a load off." To which Sybbie corrected "Or putting a load on." The two shared a laugh at the put upon man's unamused look at the teenager's teasing, while the large singer finally gave up and moved on.

Hugh had become a consistent grandfatherly figure to George that had watched the young Crawley's back by his diplomatic office. The old man hadn't forgotten what the boy had done for his little girl in New York. He had no illusions that he had conceded the role as father of Rose over to Robert, and mother to Cora. Especially after the Christmas of '28 in which Susan drunkenly and cruelly declared that she disowned Rose, viciously claiming that …

" _Rose is a Whore! I personally don't know where she came from, but she's not my daughter. I must make it plain to all of you that I don't whelp whores. So, of course, you must call Cora mama, or Mummy, or all that, because, you see darling, Cora is an_ _ **expert**_ _ **on whelping whores**_ _, so obviously you must be one of hers that got mixed in with my Chiclets. So away with you! Go be with your real mother!"_

Afterward, Susan struck the girl from her the family tree and records. There was nothing but regret in the old man's heart for having Rose so late in life. Fore he could find no help from his older children who had no attachment, history, or even love for Rose to challenge their mother's disownment. So, with no power to heal his girl's shattered heart, Shrimpy could see no way around it. He would allow Robert and Cora to officially adopt Rose when they asked. It was hard, but it was Rose's only hope in the eyes of society where her mother was trying to have her blackballed. Though he legally wasn't her father anymore, it didn't mean that he still didn't love her. Especially after all she had been through. And he'd forever be in George's debt for the way he had saved his daughter in every way imaginable.

It was why Shrimpy felt the duty to tell George about the arrival of _Alemdar Pamuk_ from Paris to Antioch. His sources had tipped him off that the bastard of the Princess of Monaco and the old Ottoman ambassador's son was looking for the heir to House Grantham, plotting and planning. A lawyer in Constantinople had filed paper work with the Foreign Office in London that all rights to the Pamuk holdings of Persian petroleum were to be signed over to Alemdar, pending some task to be completed. It wasn't a wonder what task that was. The Pamuk family had put a king's bounty on George Crawley's head since the day he was born, and now it was time to prove that Alemdar was a man, by settling the family debt with Lady Mary Crawley. It would be an eye for an eye, a son for a son, and an only child for an only child. George had crossed blades with Pamuk in Newport the day he left to return to Downton and since that fight he knew just the kind of damaged and disturbed figure Alemdar was. He was a child born of rape, taken from his traumatized and ruined mother by a vengeful old woman. There he was raised to hero worship an awful man, and to hate so bitterly the woman she blamed for his death, and her son. In that horrible environment, the child grew to become too much like his father. And George lamented the fact that it was time to somehow get Sybbie to go home, before a man like that caught up with them.

George had turned to Sybbie after the information that Alemdar was on the prowl. It had always been hard to convey to his family how different his life was to theirs. Sybbie had only seen a part of the danger, from Mexico to the Jewish Settlements, but she didn't know nor couldn't comprehend the idea what was going to happen when the bastard finally caught up with George. He knew he could never make her understand that the blond haired little boy in the nursery, the one who use to draw treasure maps and go on archeological digs in the gardens and basements of Downton, was gone. Whatever was left of that boy had died in New York. And what was going to happen when he fought the Turk's son wouldn't be like novels or the movies …

And he didn't want his best friend to see that dark side of himself.

It hadn't escaped their notice that their presence had been noted by several familiar faces. In particular was Kruger Van Ulrich, best known as "The Baron" by his own preference. Old, rotund, with a blond mustache with girth, he had once been a famed ace pilot during The Great War. Why anyone called him the Baron, no one knew, as he didn't come from the aristocracy. But one might never have known that from his smooth continental style that had charmed him into becoming the patron of the National Socialist's air racing conglomerate.

They had come to the Colonial Circuit, promising Berlin positive tests for their new fighter engines. With the best air corp. in the world, they should have been making progress, and though they had been making good time, the Fuhrer marked accomplishments by victories. They had come in second in the Cup, losing to an independent team of teenagers. One of which had been listed as one of the enemies of the German Culture. Van Ulrich had been hearing it non-stop from High Command since the end of the season. He had tried to argue that it was the conditions, that there were too many planes in the sky during the race. There was no way to gage the new engine's power. But provided with the best planes and pilots of the Reich and he still could not beat a couple of teenagers, than they might start to question his true German heritage, fore, he was clearly not a superior man. So, it seemed almost like a spit in the eye when George "The Comet" Crawley had swaggered in the tavern like he owned the place.

That was why while they were engaged in serious conversation, the Baron peeled himself from the two exotic back-up singers that crowded around him, and toasted the small party. The young pilot glared knowingly, Sybbie gave a nod of acknowledgment, and Shrimpy returned the compliment. But before they went back to their conversation, Van Ulrich called attention to the entire tavern to the tale of the only time he had come to Downton Abbey, back in the early 90's. With a sigh, George ordered a drink with a lift of two fingers to the bar, before leaning back with a creak in his seat, amused at the old windbag with a sense of adversarial endearment.

Ever the gentlemen, The Baron complimented the grandest and most beautiful Downton Abbey. He toasted it as the prettiest sculpture to ever be made out of cheap stone from landfills. Hugh's eyebrows hit his receding hairline at the insult to the great house. Ever the hothead, Sybbie smoldered immediately. "Oi, why don't you shut your mouth?!" She shouted with boos and jeers of a smuggling crew from Yorkshire. But when their pints arrived, George chuckled, rubbing Sybbie's waist comfortingly and lifted his tankard of ale in agreement with their rival.

Clearly, Van Ulrich's swing had whiffed, not knowing that his comments were tame compared to what the heir really thought of the old manor. George led a toast to Downton. "To the old scrap heap!" All in the bar cheered and took a drink.

The Baron continued that he had traveled to their Estate on a diplomatic attaché with his good friend Count Otto Von Montenuovo, who was accompanying the Hapsburg visit to England. Being showed around the countryside by King Edward, they had made a stop at Downton. The king had been quite partial to American Heiresses, and had found Lady Cora, wife to the heir, to be quite the living Sargent portrait to be observed keenly. Lord and Lady Grantham had thrown quite the dinner party on their arrival. Lady Violet was a good hostess, but was a bit stuffy, too old fashioned. To a woman that either of her great-grandchildren didn't know or remember all that well, they'd tend to agree.

Van Ulrich took a moment to toast the talent of little Lady Mary, who performed a cute little song for the King and the Austrian Emperor. George nodded in acceptance of the compliment, hardly believing that his mother could've ever been that small or innocent. He took a funny detour to tell the tale of the youngest daughter who was supposed to give a small dance in honor of their guests, but instead nervously vomited on her new frock and ran away. George was ashamed to admit how much he'd believe that happened to his poor Aunt Edith. But later that evening at the dinner party, Van Ulrich had caught the eye of the loveliest creature, with the most alluring and virginal dark blue eyes …

"I'm this bloody fucking close, I swear to almighty God, Porky Fritz!"

Sybbie shot out of her seat pointing a threatening tankard at The Baron, knowing where this was going. But George held her down. It was no secret who he was talking about to the two grandchildren who most resembled this alluring creature of, apparent, pure sex.

The smooth, continental, gentlemen had a natural storytelling talent that made dirty yarns seem to come out like Byron poetry. Putting his feet up on the table, the story was about how George thought it was going to go. The story started where all supposed filthy things done to Crawley women start, behind the drawing room that had once displayed the Della Francesca painting. As far as The Baron's story, it was much the same that George had heard before from all sorts of old Knickerbocker assholes from his time in New York. It was untrue smut, but entertaining none-the-less. The large German man ended his story by relaying that soon after their passion, Lady Cora was pregnant again. And from their union she birthed the most beautiful creature known to man. He claimed that all of Sybbie's knowledge of airplanes came from him, as well as her mother's gorgeous ass. Shrimpy with the help of his aid and several Yorkshire crewmen were holding the girl back with all their might, as Sybbie Branson struggled to give the fat man a good fonging.

But when it fell on George to defend Lady Grantham's honor, he instead proposed a toast to Lady Sybil Branson… and her glorious ass. Much to her daughter's anger, it was something that the whole bar was willing to drink too. Sybbie was about to take a swing at George, when he put an arm around her, coaching her with a chuckle at her temper to let it go. All the "has-been porker" was saying were just words that didn't mean anything. He was a zeppelin leaking foul gas, before it blew.

"I can't quite decide if you haven't a shred of honor, Grantham, or if your courage only sticks when _old society crones_ are the offenders?"

There was an arrogant and effete tone in a slight accent attached to the British voice that addressed the teenager. Like taking a hammer to a window, the frame of the smile remained but the mood was shattered in the teen's eyes. Slowly a shadow fell over George's face at the mention of New York. Sybbie had been angered, but when she saw George's face, there was a sudden darkness that was thousands of miles from the gates of Downton Abbey. A painful chill ran down her spine at the deadly rage burning like a glowing coal being blown on. Slowly, the teen removed his arm from around the girl, and turned his head toward the bar.

Count Wulfric Von Montenuovo wore a starched white shirt, perfectly matching black tie, and supple fur-lined bomber jacket. The former Commandant of the Hitler Youth was impeccably handsome with sharp features and refined angles. He didn't seem to even look at the younger boy, as he fed a lemon to the most prized of the belly dancers. Just one glance at the superiority in the way he fed the girl, like he was playing with a monkey at a petting zoo, was all George needed to know about the Nazi pilot.

"Try not to think too hard, Fritz, we all know how that ends." George had turned back to Sybbie motioning for her to follow him out.

The man slowly stroked the muscular line to the Arab girl's navel with a knuckle. "You know, some people consider the Austrian Aristocracy lucky when it was disbanded after the war. It's son's fought, lost with dignity, and was dissolved with their honor intact. It seems a more humane way to go. While the victors decay on, like a cancerous body. Each year, watching in disgrace, their sired heirs play at being greater than they are. A lesser breed of men, that their grandfather's haven't the heart to admit shame them. Especially the ones who breed _back shooters who kill old women_." There was inky black venom in his smooth voice as he side eyed the passing teenage pilot ushering his companion out.

A look of confusion marred Sybbie's fine features as she turned to George, clearly not knowing what their antagonist was talking about. But it was all too clear to the attended target, who looked filled with regret, shame, and an old hate at the blow that cut deep. He was antagonized by the words, but more so the squadron insignia on the Nazi's lapel. The last time he saw it was in Spain.

He could still see the desperate and frightened faces of the women and children of the burning city running toward the hills, trying to escape the German bombs. George would never forget the way the Nazi fighter came out of the smoky night sky. The warped sound of strafing trails that ripped into the crowd. Sometimes at night he can still hear the death rattle of twitching children torn apart, the scream of surviving mothers, and cries of the orphaned children. But seared into his nightmares was the symbol on the German fighter, the same symbol on the blond man's jacket that was worn with pride.

When George spoke there was a controlled stillness of anger, making sure everyone heard him. "It's plain you're looking for trouble." George announced to the half a dozen Nazi pilots in the tavern. "I don't make it a habit of finding it … But I guess I've gotten used to meeting it half-way." He pulled his leather jacket aside to show his father and aunt's holstered Webley revolver to the Nazi pilot. "So, if that's what you want, Montenuovo then that's what you'll get." He positioned his hand.

Music, clinking glasses, breathing, and even heart beats halted in the promise of death. French merchants quickly moved out of the way, and the bar tender reached over to grab the belly dancer next to the Austrian pilot and pulled her to safety. The Singer frightened girls huddled behind her frame. 'The Wolf' took a step from the bar, flashing his Luger. Legs spread wide on the floor. No one was quite sure that day why Wulfric Von Montenuovo had challenged George Crawley in their first, official, meeting. Some had said that it was the Nazi doctrine, the ancestry of Jewish blood, and his Zionist sponsorship. Other's believed that George was the first person to ever have beaten the Nazi racer at the only thing he had ever been good at. But what anyone did know was that seeing them together was like two different sides of a same coin. How easily they could've traded spots with one another.

Either way, death would wait ten seconds more.

"No, George!"

Out of nowhere Sybbie had thrown herself into the line of fire. She pressed her back to his chest, the top of her head of black curls pushing under his chin. She wrapped her arms backward, embracing George tightly from behind her. This wasn't like the half-a-dozen bar fights she had been in, during University and in London. For the first time Sybil Branson had come to realize what playing for keeps was in this dangerous place she had come. Here, on the frontier, anything went. And killing was the only way to win a fight in this part of the world. That realization came in a tumbling avalanche of panic and fear. Yet, her first instinct, upon realizing that, was to use herself to shield George, to protect someone she loved. But just one look into the Nazi racer's eye, brought a new understanding that he didn't care at all who was in his way … he'd start with her, just to get George.

She saw in his wild blue eyes, why he was called "The Wolf".

However, when Sybbie intervened, it brought out the once decent, chivalrous, Van Ulrich. He may have resented the children of Grantham bitterly, but he'd not stand for the fiery, raven haired, beauty being hurt. He quickly lumbered over and restrained his "nephew" by the lapel to protect the teenage girl. He quickly relayed forceful words of reason in Swiss German to the young pilot. Grudgingly, the Nazi unhanded his Luger, and instead took a step forward. It caused Sybbie to press herself tighter against George in restraint and protection.

"You may have won the cup, Grantham, but no one believes you're an actual champion, "Comet"." He said the nickname as if he were spitting. The implications and accusations of New York hung in every breath of his comment.

George came eye to eye and toe to toe with the man, Sybbie restraining between them.

"I'll take that bet!"

But years later, battle, death, and war had changed the two fiery young men who now sat in the silence of an abandoned pub in Downton. A low rumble in the distance was an audible murmur of the next wave of a coming storm. The silence in the very heart of the Grantham Arms was deafening. The two adversaries were quietly pondering this history of theirs and everything that led up to that moment. It was a retrospective sanctioned by the funhouse mirror that was ever forcibly placed between one another. It was, after all, the harshness of life that made them this way. The reasons for the rivalry echoed within the cellars of old tragedies and insurmountable legacies that neither enemy felt that they could ever touch, much less live up too.

What they had been anticipating, what they had come for, seemed so close now. But there were the occasional second thoughts. It was a question that came with the scenario of the split second empathy of maybe getting out while he still could, sneak out the back door. It was all the things that one tells themself before doing something hard, finally accomplishing something that had alluded one another for years. The echo of everything unsaid, undid, and unfelt in a life so full of regret was put up against the flip of a coin of chance on one faithful stormy night.

"Do you ever think about it, Grantham? Do you ever think about them?"

There was something oddly … human in the Nazi's voice. He stared off into space absently, his eyes focused on things that were not there. There was no arrogance, no double meaning, no vile in his soft tone. His eyes lightened and his face mournful, maybe even regretful.

"About what?" George stared at the alcohol residue in his glass.

There was a pause, the words stuck in the Count's throat as he shifted in his stance, lifting the weight in his chest. "Your first …" He turned to the younger man in absolute honesty. "The first person you ever killed. Do you ever go back, do you ever wonder … wonder what would've happened if you never did that? Never …" He was trying to make sense of the feelings that had overcome him. "You never chose to do that, how different your life would be?" He asked himself more than the man next to him.

There was a long pause as George stared absently at the poster of his mother. "Till I'm sick …" He admitted quietly with a mournful look away from her, shifting weight from one arm to the other that rested on the bar.

"Riker Herschmann, a banker from Vienna." The blond nodded, his eyes clouded in memory of mountains, forests, and the fog that clung to the old battlements of his home. "After the war, we had to pay death duties for my father, plus the share of the war debt. Herschmann was a squat man, glasses, balding, and short tempered. He was one of those men who never had power, and then was given too much. Each month, he'd yell at my mother, threaten to take the castle from us, he hated the silly English debutant trying to keep a roof over our heads. I watched my family's prized possessions being carried off month after month, year after year. And each time there was this … small man, making such nasty comments to my mother, the foreigner, as if she was why the Empire fell. Every word he spoke, each gland of sweat on his shiny head, tore at me when I'd hear him condescend to her. I heard him over and over again, till I couldn't take it anymore. So I started following him, keeping out of sight, out of mind. And each time I challenged myself to take it one step further. Follow him till he left the woods, follow him till he reached the village, till he reached the local tavern, till he got home … for months. It was miniscule, but it … it gave me power over him, the power of any moment, I could, could end him."

"And then, then one day, we were short on our payment. He wouldn't even hear of an extension, but then he saw my mother's necklace. It was a gift from my father on their wedding day, and she hadn't taken it off since the day he left for Palestine and never came back. He was willing to overlook our balance for the month, if she gave it up. There was nothing worse in the world … nothing, than watching her let it go. The doctors, they say it was one thing, than it was the other, but what I really think killed her … what really killed her was finally parting with the diamond pearls my father gave her. After she died, after her funeral, I followed that small, **small** man the way I had been for so long. I watched him take my mother's necklace and put on every peasant girl pretty enough for him and stupid enough to be charmed. And then I waited, waited till he was drunk, drunk and stumbling back to his room in the tavern. I waited till they all went to bed, then I filled pitcher after pitcher with beer. He was sleeping it off, when I tied him to the bed posts. I put a pillow case over his head. And then I spent hours, days, I don't know how long, I guess I never will … talking to him, giving him a history lesson of every piece of my family history, heritage, that he took off us. And each time I poured one pitcher, one stein of the thickest beers over his face, he choked, gasped, pleaded … but I just gave him his drink, and one more history lesson …"

Wulfric poured himself the last of his mother's brand, just to taste the fermented mixture of horror and satisfaction of that moment when the small, Jewish man had stopped twitching for good. He drank down the small glass in gulps before he came up for air, finishing his story where his heart and conscious had left it. He turned to the RAF pilot, after bearing his blackened and consumed soul to his enemy. But George didn't say anything. He just stared at a flyer on the wall that had a drawn graphic silhouette of Downton Abbey. And for one last time he wondered, how far away, how close he could've been in another world, in another reality, to becoming the man next to him.

"How about you?" The Wolf asked clacking his glass down.

A taut jaw shifted and the man looked down at the bar. "You already know mine …" George took Mrs. Hughes's whiskey bottle. "Seems there aren't a lot of people these days that don't." there was a brooding voice to the young man who poured himself a glass.

"Maryse Van Houten … mother of an American Senator from New York … along with ..."

"I know their names, trust me." George halted him.

"But you've never told the story. All anyone knows is that …"

"I know what I did."

"But why?"

"I had my reasons …" He cut the man off harshly.

It was true that there were a few that knew of the things he had done, or if not known, suspected. There were millions of reasons that people had come up with and surmised of the motive for what happened in New York. But all the theories were unproven. And for a long stretch of silence it would seem that the Count would just be another speculator. The man next to him only stared at the poster of his mother quietly. But, just when the Nazi opened his mouth, George started to talk.

"Someone had stolen my Granny's prized Worth gown from San Sochi. It was a dress that she met my grandfather in, the one she fell in love in … it was precious to them, precious to me. I tracked the thief down to the Van Houten house, in "Dutch Town" by a horse and carriage the thief used. Maryse Van Houten had it stolen from San Sochi. She wanted it as a prize in her collection of Worth gowns she taken from other fallen families of New Money, like they were Indian scalps. When I went to go get it back, I heard a noise from a back room down the hall …"

"They were all gathered around in chairs, wearing their night robes. They looked like some sort of high society pajama council. Ro … a young mother, stood in front of them for a long time, and then she undid her robe and let it fall …" There was something shameful in the way George's head dropped. "She was mostly naked, but for a harem outfit of a blue satin sash for a skirt and a slave girl's collar. I remember her studying the bedroom drapes in disassociation, hands behind her back in submission, while the rest of the hags all clapped at _the show_. Each got a turn observing her body like they were at some twisted livestock show. Each one of them examining, fondling … kissing." His hand began to shake in violence. "One old woman in particular took a great interest in licking the girl's navel."

"I …" George cleared his throat. "I don't know what happened. I don't know how long they had been doing this with her. But something about that night … she had, had enough, or she just couldn't do it anymore. I remember her starting to cry when two of the crones were racing a trail of slobbery kisses down her belly. She kept telling them that she had to get home … home to her children, to her … to her _nephew_. She kept saying she had to go home. And they ignored her … they just kept, they kept … finally one of them had enough when the girl started begging through sobs for them to stop. The hag grabbed her by her hair, yanked her head back … told her that she didn't have children, and that she didn't have a nephew unless they told her that she did. She made it viciously clear that the girl belonged to them now, and everything she had in her previous life could be taken from her as they please. As long as I live, I'll never forget the sound she made when she hocked up body fluid from her chest and spit in the girl's face in demonstration of their power over her."

"The last thing I remember was that angry, cruel, old bat, leading the girl by her hair and throwing her back on a silk bed, and then all of them descending on her like crows at a corpse." The pilots jaw screwed tight. "I didn't watch what came after that. I closed my eyes and heard what they were doing to her, and then I remembered the dresses. I remembered their mocking words and the stories they made up about _us_ , the laughing, always with the laughing at our possessions that they bought as trophies and hung on their walls like decorations. The way they hunted her, dressed her up, trussed her up, and were devouring her like animals … like animals."

The sights, sounds, and smells of the memories haunted George Crawley. There was an old trauma that gripped him, and just for a moment he felt like he was there again. He gritted his teeth in an old rage, hand twitching to take a hold of the weapon at his side. George downed the whole glass of whiskey, clearing his throat, the burning steadying his shaking hand.

"When I got my head back, I was standing in the middle of the room. My father's gun was smoking in my hand. I had thrown the door open, rushed inside, and didn't stop firing till the room was painted in blood, and the last of the old women stopped twitching. They were like rabid dogs … and I put them down, Every-Single-Last-One."

When George was done with his story, there was a long pause of the deepest darkness. Whatever Wulfric Von Montenuovo thought he was going to hear, this certainly wasn't it. He tried to process the picture in his head, tried to find the right in all of it. But every detail of the story was vile, wicked, evil, and wrong. It was hard to comprehend it as anything but the swish of Satan's scaly tail. The Austrian Count turned to consider that boy eight years later, to see what carrying something like that could do to someone. And yet, he couldn't shake the same question he thought to himself the moment the story started.

"Who was she?" the Nazi racer asked. "This girl you saved. Who was she to you?" There was fascination and interest in the motivation for such a dark action born of blinding anger.

George was quiet. He shifted his jaw, staring at the graphic design of Downton Abbey again. "Never got a name …" He lied with a shrug of his shoulders and looked back into his drinking glass. It would be an answerless question till the end of time. George would never tell a soul who she was, he'd protect her forever.

"Well …" The Austrian halted his sip. "At least someone benefited from it." He toasted the RAF Ace, before slugging down the chute.

But George just shook his head. "She just lied there, naked and covered in blood. Van Houten's gunshot wound was bleeding all over her breasts. I tried to cover her, to comfort her. But she cried when I got close. She kept saying that it was her fault, that all of it was her fault. She was terrified of me and she kept apologizing, like … like I was gonna shoot her next." There was never more shame in the world than in the youth's voice at recalling the broken fear in the way the blood and wine soaked girl looked at a twelve year old she had done all her perceived wickedness for.

"I just got my Granny's dress and I ran out of there." The young man bowed his head.

There was a journalist every several years from that day forward, which would look into the grizzly details, look to solve the frozen mystery of the Halloween Massacre of 1932. But even eighty-five years later, even when the Van Houten family runs on progressive, liberal, platforms in their political dynasty. They'd never allow what happened that night, what really happened, to come out. The only witness, a black Lady's Maid, was found murdered the next day. A Pinkerton was questioned, but no arrests were ever made. But the truth of that night, even near a century later, could destroy everything that a young Dutch family built over three hundred years ago on the cobbled streets of New Amsterdam. Thus, the dusty and ancient police reports remained caught in a web of ancient lies. It would always say the same thing.

Four matriarchs were murdered by a bold thief after an old Gilded Age, American Countess's, Worth evening gown.

It was now out in the open, the very moments that had made the adversaries that they were today. Their demons exposed with the faces and names of the very person, the people that had sent them down this path of destruction. One a path of hatred for everyone and everything, the slights on a life that should've been picture perfect, that he had been brought up to believe was superior than others. The other, a dark, brooding figure, who lived down the things he had done under the shadow of a long dead man whose nobility haunted him. Haunted him with the knowledge that all the things he had done in believe of righteousness were sins to a boy who knew he was better than the actions he took. One man thought he was better than everyone else, because of who he was. The other thought he should be a better man, because of the love and nobility that bore him into existence.

Wulfric felt his flask was light, and saw that George was done drinking. There wasn't enough alcohol in the world to make all the things wrong in his life go away, especially here in Downton, of all places. There was nothing left to say, nothing left to understand about one another. It was time, and they both knew it. There was no running away, no truces to be made, and no walking away this time. They both knew that there was not a universe in balance while the other breathed.

Tonight it would end.

With the last little bit of the schnapps that his mother ever made, Von Montenuovo lifted his drink to salute. "To Maryse Van Houten …" He toasted. George stared at the man in the void of finality that overcame the very two souls who carried demons intertwined in a war over familiarity. He lifted the last gulp of whiskey in his glass.

"To Riker Herschmann …" He nodded and clinked his glass against The Wolf's with a ring that echoed through the dark. "May they burn in hell close enough for us to watch." He saluted his glass before knocking it back.

A laugh escaped the Nazi's throat. "Fantastic …" he commended on the sentiment before drinking down the last of his liquor.

When they were done, they continued to stare at one another. It was a strange moment. What do you say to a man you've hated for so long? What do you say to a man you shared your most personal moments of true darkness in combat against one another, who you confided your darkest of secrets just so they would not be forgotten when you were gone? What do you say to a man you were going to duel and kill this very night? They both nodded at the cosmic trap that every soldier must face at some point or another. George and Wulfric looked away as shadows of the abandoned pub suddenly swallowed all but the flickering lantern light.

"Well …" George sighed. "I guess it's about that time." The whisky bottle made a popping noise when he placed a wine cork inside it.

"Mmm …" The Nazi agreed with a nod. "I guess it is." He got up, placing his flask within his coat pocket. George made a mental note where not to aim later. He turned toward the sitting youth at the bar. "Farewell, Grantham …" Standing at attention, he clicked his boot heels.

George turned and gave a two fingered salute. "See you in hell, Wolf." He smirked with one last flourish of arrogance in taunting.

There was a wild look of hate behind the smarmy smile. "Eventually, Comet." He turned and with languid steps that could've said he was off to meet a girl later, he walked out the door. When it hit the frame, the bell jingled, and the world got deathly silent for only a moment before thunder rolled. When the first tinker of light rain hit the tin roof it echoed gently and George knew that he was alone again.

He looked down at his collection of things, the medicine vile, his father's medals, and the stuffed dog. They were everything that made him who he was, his totems. Not because they were a part of him, but, because they symbolized every failure in his life. Not being fast enough to save Cora. Not finding another way to save Rose, like his father would have. And lastly, was George Crawley being a failed wish upon a shooting star of a pair of star-crossed lovers. In such a grand love story, George knew himself to be a disappointment to the expectations of what their love had accomplished for not just himself, but for everyone.

Slowly he kissed the vile and placed it back in his inner breast pocket. He rolled up the tattered cloth with his father's war medals and placed them in his large leather pocket. But when he finished he found that someone was holding the little dog out to him. He looked down to see that the blond haired man with sincere crystal eyes were back.

Matthew Crawley wasn't wearing his uniform anymore, but a set of tux and tails. He looked dressed for a formal dinner down the road. George didn't miss that it was the same tux that he had first seen him in when he was dancing with the beautiful woman in the foyer. He could no longer convince himself that he didn't know who she was … who this man was.

"You've almost fixed her …" There was a grateful and hopeful tone in his voice.

George stared at the man and what he was offering. Instead of taking it, he only snorted at the comment. "Story of my life." Instead, he grabbed the glass and the bottle and walked away. Matthew watched him go around the bar, disappearing in the darkness.

There was a flicker of something going on outside. Matthew turned and saw that there were shadows gathering in the town square were the ruins of the War Memorial lay broken. There weren't many figures, but enough to give him pause. He saw that a man had a torch amongst them, and they were busy making more. A tall figure in a big, black, fur lined, leather coat was instructing them.

"There are men outside …" Matthew turned back in worry.

George was quiet as he dumped his glass in a bin. "Yeah well …" the young pilot sighed. He dug underneath the bar and began pulling out cartridge boxes. "No one ever accused Wolf of fighting fair." He shrugged. Matthew saw in the lantern light that the cartridge boxes he was pulling out were ammunition. Reaching for his hip, the youth drew their converted Webley VI revolver.

The man looked panicked. "You're going to fight all of them?!" His voice was drown by the clatter of spent casings that hit the bar counter.

George looked at his father laconically. "Or, you know, I can wait in here for them to burn me out." He shrugged. "They're out there right now, surrounding us … thus the torches." He widened his eyes in mocking exasperation that carried the ghost of Lady Mary in it. He didn't seem panicked at all as he began picking out rifle cartridges and loading them into his weapon.

"What are you gonna do?" He stood up.

George spun the revolver with expert demonstration before twirling it back to the holster, knowing that it annoyed Matthew with the familiarity. "Go out there and clean'em out … Learned a thing or two from the Jewish Militia and Arab Bandits while in the Holy Land. Here, get Daisy's shotgun." He motioned to the gun leaning against the bar. When he did, George was stacking rounds in a cigarette pack like a clip. "Put it down here …" He motioned to the counter in front of him.

The man in tux and tails looked as if he had lost his mind. "Are you mad?" He asked.

"Getting there …" The youth picked a bullet out from his teeth and packed it into the cardboard pack.

"You need to fight your way out of here and go for help." He lectured, flinching at a passing shadow from across the street.

George dumped a box of shotgun shells on the counter. "Sure, let's do that …" He began grabbing handfuls of them and shoveling them in his jacket pocket. "I get one or two of them, slip out Lady Cora Street, and go down to Thirsk to sound the alarm. It'll take all night, but I can get men here by three or four." He nodded in agreement.

There was not a smidgen of poor judgment in this plan. But there was an infuriating way in which Matthew was starting to notice that his boy shot people down. He was becoming an expert in making one feel quite the fool for even suggesting what one might consider the logical choice in a situation.

"I don't see a problem!" He shook his head.

But George glared. "Where do you think they're gonna go?" He asked. "They'd have to be stupid to try and follow me to Thirsk or Ripon, knowing that there are garrisons there. There's about five of them, enough to hold up in an abandoned building, with no food or water, till the Army comes to collect them or …" George left it opened ended.

It hit Matthew like a ton of bricks. "Downton … Mary." He whispered her name, pale hand running across his lips in worry as he looked in the direction of the Abbey.

With a heavy metal clank, the shotgun barrel opened. Two spent copper and red plastic shells popped out of the tubes and dropped with clacks on the wooden floor boards. "Yep …" George confirmed both of their worst fears with a grunt. "I don't deal with them now. They go up the hill and shoot up the staff, hold Donk and Aunt Edith hostage, and take turns at Mom, Rachel, and Rose all night and day. Then they'd kill everyone when the army feels like dropping in on the Lord Leftenant with small matters." There was nothing but frigid reason in George's voice.

"Surely it won't come to …"

"I was in Spain and France, in Cairo and Alexandretta, over London during Eagle Day …!" George snapped at his father. "Don't talk at me with "surely", when you haven't seen what these Nazis are capable of like I have!" For a moment Matthew saw just the phantom of what Rose saw in New York. "It ends here … you understand me?!" He pointed his finger at his father. "No more!" He shouted angrily. The fires of a Northern Spanish city, the ruins of his Aunt Rosamund's house, and the fiery explosion that claimed Atticus flashed in his eyes. There was a long tense moment before he took a deep breath and began loading shells. "No more …" He repeated quietly determined.

Matthew was silent as he watched his son load the shotgun. He looked helplessly angry at a situation he could not control. He instinctually looked to the sky in accusation, before he turned back to his son in resignation and defeat.

"If you go out there, if you do this … you must know that neither Sybil nor I can interfere this time." He took a cautionary step forward, his breath baited. He looked startled, his eyes weighted.

"I understand." George never looked up, never blinking.

When he finally did, he met his father's gaze truthfully for the first time. There was so much to be said between them. But he couldn't think of one thing to say. Words came cheap when their experience together, their shared emotions on this journey, was worth a thousand hours of flowery or weighty language spoken.

"Don't worry about me, Dad …" He smirked sadly, snapping the shotgun barrels back closed in confidence. "It's just one more fight." He gave a resign nod of a young man who had been through this too many times in his life.

As their time together came to a close, George was given one last absolution of clarity before he faced his last fight. He had been bothered, tormented for these last four years of the mirror that stood between him and the man who had murdered Atticus, who had massacred the women and children refugees of the Spanish Civil War. He had wondered if the insignia on a plane was the only thing that had separated the two noblemen. But in this, a father and son's parting moment, he knew it not to be true.

It was a slippery slope of circumstance, old ways versus the new ideas, and the willingness to change. George Crawley had many sins that he had to live with in his life, but the demons of the man he'd face tonight were never one of them. There were many similarities, but one large difference that made it for all of it. His name was Matthew Crawley. George might never had known his father, but the man had made it his life's work till the day he died to make sure that his boy was protected from the very darkness inside the devil set against him. He built from the ashes of ruin a modernized, self-sufficient, Downton. It was a working business of the ingenuity and innovation of a middle-class upbringing, able to throw off the past, without losing it. Even years and a rejected legacy later, the weight on the boy that Matthew had always dreamed of with his beloved wife, rested easier knowing that his family still had a home, that their lives and livelihoods were not resting on his shoulders like others.

It was a father's foresight out of love for a soul yet to exist that saved it from the all-consuming darkness that had taken his rival.

George placed a hand on his father's shoulder. "See you in a little bit …" George said to the man in parting. Giving Matthew's face one last look, remembering him the way he had always imagined him, the way his mother saw him in her dreams.

A tear fell from Matthew's eye. "My dearest chap …" he grabbed both of the younger man's shoulders. "Not for many, many years to come." He shook his head with a sputtered breath. He cupped the young man's face and looked into his eyes. In a flash he saw the most beautiful woman in the world in a riding outfit standing in his new drawing room. He was holding her hand in the library for the first time, an evening by the salty sea, a kiss at the dinner table. She had wished him such good luck on the platform of the train station. They sang together at the piano to a room full of people, and she was there when he woke up with this odd sensation of not feeling his legs. She pushed his wheelchair, and nearly cried when he found his legs again. Then they danced, danced till they couldn't stand it anymore, till they kissed each other with all the passion and love within them. It was snowing and he loved her … she was walking down the aisle, glowing, and he loved her. And she had given him what he had most wanted in the world, and here he was …

In front of him were all of those magical moments and memories of love that were compressed into one soul.

But when George opened his eyes, there was no one there.

All that was left of a man's celebration of victory in a life was the placement of a tiny stuffed dog within his son's hand. He gripped it tightly as he looked straight ahead. He didn't bother looking around for his father, because, he was left staring at the one thing he knew he wanted him to see.

On the far wall was a collection of framed pictures. They were local events of the past. There were unsmiling figures in black and white, beige and brown, looking into the camera. They were of a crowded hall of people milling about at a flower show. A tall handsome footmen standing in batting position as Doctor Clarkson was about to throw a cricket ball. There were a group of farmers and their wives standing against the backdrop of the great manor house as a fair went on in front of it. But there was one picture in particular that caught his eyes. A deep sorrow welled in his gut as he leaned the shotgun against the wall.

The flash of lightning lit the picture that George took off the wall. It was taken at a local stock show. A beautiful, stylish, woman in brown tweed and a matching hat stood inside a pig pen. There was a tenuous look of joy on her pallid face, her red tinted eyes marred by a breaking of sadness in the flash of a moment. All of her happiness and joy, however short it might have been, came from a small boy in her arms. He was blond haired, with big doe dark blue eyes, and covered in matching tweed to his mother. Their faces were pressed together, smiling and giggling. He remembered that the photographer had told them to keep serious. But a cow kept mooing strangely in the background and she couldn't keep a straight face, and because she couldn't, neither could he. It was in that memory, in the way it felt to be hoisted up and curl to her warmth on a cold afternoon, to hear the sights and sounds of country life. To see the collection of happiness of the people closest to him … that George Crawley, for the first time after twelve years of wandering, felt homesick.

He ran an affectionate thumb over the frame of the beautiful woman that, strangely, hadn't seemed to age a day in sixteen years. Their picture lit by the glowing light coming closer. He couldn't ignore the ache in his chest, couldn't dismiss the sentiment of how much he missed her so suddenly. He could fight it, but there no getting around that this cold, regal, vampiric woman, was all he had left in the world. So many years spent hating her, and here at the end, he found it all to be a waste. Even if she didn't exist anymore, he couldn't shake the pure love for the woman in the picture.

„ _ **Crawley, Sie krank gezüchteten Hund! Kommen Sie und sterben, oder wir werden den ganzen schmutzigen Ort auf den Boden zu verbrennen!"**_

A harsh and vicious voice shouted from outside the window in German.

Unfazed, the young man quietly placed the old frame back on the wall with the others. As he picked up the Shotgun, he gave one last look at all the pictures, all the memories of a grand and glorious yesterday. All the faces, all the names, that he had once known, that made him, made this place, what it is. It took a long time to understand it, and maybe he still didn't. But all the hatred, all the anger, it seemed to slip away when confronted with the picture of his Uncle Tom and Aunt Rose in front of the village school with that 'old witch' Sarah Bunting. The picture of his Donk, Granny, and Aunt Rosamund posing with Mrs. Patmore in front of her Bed and Breakfast. When he closed his eyes, absorbing it all, there was irony in the pitiful laugh that the young man gave, here at the end of everything. Then, he whispered with heavy sadness, resignation, and finally … context.

"The Earl of Grantham"

Seeing the glow of a torch coming, the young man kissed the little great dame in hand, pocketing it, and slowly strode across the barroom. He paused only to blow out the Lantern. As he made his way to the door he halted when he was met by someone waiting for him. It was a small boy with blond curls and big dark blue eyes. He wore a winter coat and cap. Lady Cora Crawley's scarf was wrapped around his nose and mouth, the reward for the protection from the bitter cold was the lovely smell of her perfume. His hands were too small, even for Lady Mary Talbot's black leather gloves. In his grip was a white paper bag.

The little boy was waiting for the young man at the door. His eyes were frightened and in a panic, but it wasn't going to stop him, nothing was that day, or any other day since. There was anxiety, looking up at his counterpart, his breath frothing in the Christmas cold. George smirked sadly, frightened and in a panic, but like back then, nothing was gonna stop him from saving his family.

„ **Komm raus und kämpfen, Komet!"** A voice taunted angrily from outside.

George gave a deep breath and looked down at the boy. "What do you say, kid?" He motioned his head outside. "Why don't we get it right this time?" He asked.

The small boy looked out the window and then back at the man. A single tear fell from his eye, but he still nodded. George returned it and opened the door. "Give you a head start." His face was covered, but he could feel the small child's smirk. Together they left as the same man. There was a jingle when, for maybe for the last time ever …

The Heir of Downton Abbey walked out of the Grantham Arms.

* * *

 **STOP!**

 **If this is you furiously scrolling down to leave a bad review because of George/Marigold … go back and actually read the story, and or read it again to understand it. If you have and you're still, for some reason, angry, then by all means let me have it. But do me a favor, don't sign in if you do.**

* * *

 _Acknowledgements_

"Live Oak" – Jason Isbell

"Waltzing with You" – Jay Ungar (George and Marigold in Fort Worth)

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _Sorry about the length guys, I tried to figure a way to cut this down, but there was no way to do it without screwing with the narrative. This was all written at once, which I also did with "The Battle of Grantham" but there was a way to cut that in half. There was no way in this one. But I promise there's only one more flashback. Which means that this is the last extra-long chapter in the story._

 _There you have it, guys. There is literally nothing else, beyond references to adventures, this is all you need to know about George Crawley. This chapter was to tie up the Mysteries surrounding George's past, and a little bit of Sybbie and Marigold's as well. Thus the length._

 _If you go back to the very first chapter of this story, you will see that everything mentioned or hinted at within that chapter is paid off in this. And yes, even, Marigold and George. That was the idea from the beginning and If you care to go back, if you're interested, you'll see it was being built up over many chapters._

 _The adventures hinted at, like the "Westworld" esque Wild West tale in Mexico, the Colonial Cup, and George V. Mary at the Point to Point are all Fanfic ideas that I've had during the writing of this story. They are actually more fun and not very dark or angsty stories. If whoever is left reading this story is interested in those longue adventures let me know. If you want to know the tone of the Mexico story play the first minute of the main title to the soundtrack of" Back to the Future III". And as pointed out in a much earlier chapter Edith is the big hero._

 _And before I go, I have to apologize to Eyeon, you asked in PM, I told you no, because I wasn't sure, at the time, that I was going to go through with it, and then I decided too. So, yeah, I'm a big liar, and I'm sorry._

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	13. Interlude: Part I - The Sultans of Swing

**Interlude: Part I**

 _ **The Sultans of Swing**_

 _London_

 _1936_

There was a dampness that clung to the moldy stone of buildings. The late chill of the young New Year's winter exhaled on the clacking and clicking heels of shoes that pounded the slick spots of newly melted snow on concrete. A haze had fallen over the busy streets, a mix of exhaust from the bustle of the capital city of an empire and the fog that rolled in from the river front. On a dark, cloudy, night the dim street lamp light barely cut through the obscurity of the dense streets of shadowy figures that moved about on their after-hours business. All around was the chaos of rushing automobiles, shouting voices, and honking double decker buses. It was a loud and chaotic world wrapped in the smell of old snow and piss.

It was London, no doubt about it.

And yet there was something enduring of its citizens that moved within the ancient city. A considerable pride in this stone and glass explosion of British architecture filled to the brim with the exotic and expensive diversity of a declining empire. It was the only place in the world in which you might enter a shop from a wet and cold atmosphere in order to buy an African Wild Cat's pelt, bagged in the most hot and dustiest climate imaginable. The world was changing, and the first whiff of danger brewing across the North Sea was starting to enter the people's minds. The whispered rumor of war was carried through the echo of a mad man's rants in Munich, which played the marching music for goose steeping figures with torches and swastikas. But for now, the people of London moved on with their tasks, hoping to live the lives that their parents and grandparents had in a world before the last war. It wasn't stopping the change that they were interested in, but more, the security of the old world.

In Britain there had always been an order to life, a person had their place, a job waiting for them. But after the loss of a generation of young men to a Monarch's family dispute, and a financial depression, they'd all give up just a little bit of everything normalized in the 20's just for a taste of the Edwardian assurety. They'd never resort to the wild, roaming, lawlessness of the vast landscapes of America. After all, they were Englishmen. But lost in a Labour Government's gross mismanagement of a National Crisis, and with the whole industrial complex shut down, London was a jobless city in a horrible spot.

But, somehow, all these pressures didn't seem to worry a little boy in cap and coat that stood on a subway grate. His face was pale, slightly dirty, his clothing dowdy and patched. But there was not a moment of unhappiness in his big doe eyes as he giggled, knee's cranking in anticipation. He looked up at a young woman with a basket of goods donated from the local Catholic Diocese and the 'wanted ads' from most London papers under arm. Her face showed that she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, but it all seemed to be forgotten in her little boy's smile. Just for a prayer's pause, there were so many others with harder luck than hers, as long as she heard the giggled excitement from a little boy going weak kneed at the humor coming. From down the street, there was just a touch of static snapping up the metal stakes, streetlights flickering in order. The grate rattled underfoot and then the boy squealed in laughter. A violent cloud of steam exploded from the gaps in the grating, the force testing the industrial bulkheads that held it in place. The small child rushed off the platform, cackling the whole way, to where his mother waited. They both were laughing as they came together.

It was the simple pleasure in a life was how he taught his mother to face every day in this harsh world.

With the boy holding her 'important papers' the two held hands as they melted into a crowded street. The boy was still smiling as they moved with the foot traffic that flowed parallel to iron bar fences that guarded the white stone estates and the lit storefronts that reflected the sitting customers inside. However, he spotted a leaning figure watching him and his mother pass. The figure's back pressed against an advertisement of an East End play, his eyes shadowed under the brim of a brown outback fedora. His hands were inside the pockets of a double breasted, mahogany colored, leather jacket. He was a young man who had halted his progress to his destination to watch mother and son for a moment. The boy tilted his head at the mysterious figure with the slouched forward fedora and jacket collar popped up in the back. But before he could get a good look, his mother tugged him along playfully. He would've waved goodbye if he wasn't holding the papers.

Dark blue eyes watched them till they disappeared into the fog, and then he turned his gaze back to the subway grate. It had been hard to see who they were, and it was very likely he didn't know them. But when the figure had been walking, he couldn't help but stop and stare. He was attacked by a sudden, unrelated, moment of nostalgia. In the shadows of many forgotten yesterdays the figure thought he saw someone else in the obscurity. He had become overwhelmed with sentiments of familiarity on these cobbled streets that were getting harder and harder to remember as the years went by. But there had been a time, a place, within the brick, stone, and mold, in which he knew how mother and child had felt. It seemed like long ago now and maybe it was. But when you loved someone, when you really loved them, the dates and places may go away, but it was hard to forget the feelings.

And after eight years of being away, there were phantoms of a mother's love around every corner of London.

The youth gridded his teeth to offset the pressure of an old emotion in his chest, then, he adjusted his hat. There was a lull in the crowd when he moved on. Where he was going, there was bound to be less crowds the more he continued. He wasn't overly familiar with this part of town. But, then, what eight year old was? This wasn't exactly his scene when he was last here. To be honest, he couldn't imagine it was anyone's that he knew, except, maybe his aunt's before she was married.

He started to notice that the streets were starting to get less congested. The people became scarce. But, most of all, the dress code was fancier with every block. The music from the buildings echoed off the cement and old stone. Swing music and standards sounded from restaurants and dives that were filled with men in suits traveling in packs, cheering one another as they went in. While climbing out from the taxis were the girls in trench coats that covered the flowing, sheer and linin, dresses accented with bows. They passed in front of the youth, trailing clouds of their mother's perfumes. They were giggling, holding onto their bonnet hats with one hand, the other holding onto their friend's as they shuffled into the pubs.

There was a level of discomfort in the overall safety of the drinking district that the boy wasn't used too. For the last seven years, the places like this that he had been accustomed, you kept your head down, you didn't look anyone in the eye, and you ignored the screams for help. Nine times out of ten, that was how they get the suckers who's mothers raised them right, the fools that had no business in Tin Pan Alley or the back streets of The French Quarter. But here in London, the Bobbies were out in force. There was a level of civility and culture to the debauchery that there wasn't in New Orleans, San Antonio, and Santa Fe. It was a sad thought that harmless fun in reasonable safety was so foreign to the young man.

But his destination was not where the working chaps and the school girls were going tonight. His destination was out on the horizon. It was seen by the gliding pattern of lit redundancy that flashed in the dark sky above the foggy sheen. Two search lights rose above the skyline of this end of the city. They crisscrossed and then arched back, then crisscrossed, and arched back. Like the North Star to lost sailors in dire need of shore leave, it signaled for everyone with two feet and in need of entertainment to come see what was going on.

Shamefully, though he didn't know why, the part of town where his destination was located, indeed, had been familiar to him. There was barely any traffic, foot or otherwise. Weaving between ancient buildings of grey and white stone were least three or four patrol officers afoot on every block. The streets were distinguished by the expensive automobiles rushing by on the old cobbled roads. Chauffeurs in a familiar uniform, parked along the curve to let out dapper men in tuxedos and upper class women in mink coats that covered their satin and lace evening gowns. Hosts and doormen stood guard in front of grand hotels and the finest Restaurants. They kept a suspicious eye under their service caps at the young man in fedora and hands in the pockets of his leather jacket that walked by them. They believed that the young adventurer, obviously, didn't belong with the type of tycoons, heiresses, Lords, and Ladies, that gave patronage to their posh establishments. But they just couldn't understand the smirk when the boy met their gaze under his low brim. They might have been bowing and scraping for him to enter …

If they only, truly, knew who he was.

The two story building was right in the center of a forked street of cobble stone. Music, laughter, and conversation were echoing down the block from behind stained glass double doors. Hot Jazz pilfered loudly down the street each time the doors opened to let people in and out of the swinging nightclub. Behind a roped off red carpet, was a long line of people with their umbrellas shielding their furs and long coats. Jewels, tiaras, and diamond cuffs were out and in full display. It was growing clearer by the minute that some of these people had never thought that they'd have to queue in their life. But, if they weren't on the list, and they wanted to see what it was all about, it was the only way. The young man halted on the sidewalk off the side of the street to stop and admire it.

Framed by the search lights was the new nightclub _**"THE RUNAWAY"**_ in the heart of London Society. Its sign was in fine and golden neon letters that was lit brightly, shadowed against the alleys, and reflected in the puddles of the street. Below it was a bright and sparkling marquee that announced the acts of " **Jimmy Jacks and the "New Orleans Chiefs** " who were playing that night. Placing his hands on his hips, there was a big, stupid, grin on the young man's face. Pure emotion was lit like fire crackers in his dark blue eyes. A wash of happy, enduring, and sad memories overcame him as he read each line again. To think there was a time when they ate deer, bird, crawfish, and alligator just to survive out in the Louisiana Bayou. Now in just three years, look at them. Sometimes life can't always be what you want it to be ...

But sometimes it can.

In the winter's chill there was a knot in the tall, large gutted, young black man that stood at the head of the red carpet. He was trying not to look nervous, standing behind the roped off entrance in front of the big glass double doors. He had never done this before, never been a bouncer. Which were all small potatoes compared to telling white folks who can come in and who couldn't. It would be one thing back home, but here, in a foreign country? Get the hell outta here with that! All of these people, who sound like royalty from radio and pictures shows, and look it to boot, and here he was, straight outta 'The Big Easy', tell'in them they couldn't get into their club? He kept a mean face that said not to mess with him. But he didn't know what he was gonna do if he stepped on one high born toe or the other and they send those fuzzy headed boys in front of Winsor to come get him. He'd been in London for almost three years and he still didn't feel he got the hang of this place. There was a freedom, unlike anywhere back home, but it was offset by so many other rules for people, especially all the places he'd been _printing magazines_ and cooking since he got here.

But just when he was praying that he didn't want any trouble, he was sure it had found him. Completely superseding the line of fancy white folks was a tall figure in double breasted leather jacket and outback fedora. He stepped over the rope and was walking right for the gigantic youth, undeterred. His breath hitched, and he fixed the bowtie on his tuxedo. Adrenaline was rushing through his veins and he was nervous about what exactly he was going to do. He didn't think he had ever been this nervous before, and that included the times that he and his friends had faced down the Klan a couple years ago.

"Sor – sorry, sir …" His voice squeaked out, before he over compensated with a big burly one that he knew right away was trying too hard. "Got to wait in line …" He put a large hammy hand out to him. The figure halted, his face shadowed under hat.

"Unless I'm on the list …" There was something playfully helpful in his suggestion.

The big boy was given pause by the youthful American accent that the figure spoke with. It was rare these days to meet a fellow expatriate. But more so, if he squinted, he knew the voice. Though deeper than he remembered, the voice seemed to twist his insides, making him light headed in an anxiety of fondness and friendship. For a long moment, the older of the two frowned at the mysterious figure, trying to get a good look.

Finally he broke out of it. "Yeah, oh yeah, of course, sir … name." He quickly looked at his list, trying to refocus his mind that looked at words that he couldn't quite read suddenly.

The other boy took a step forward. "Do you really need me to tell you, Charlie, or has it been that long?" He asked in mock offense.

Eyes flicked up quickly, like an animal in the woods who hears a twig snap in the distance. All of his life he had been known as "Lead Belly" by anyone who just gazed at him. He was a boy was born in a Mississippi whore house, raised on a madam's good cooking, and a bottle of corn liquor to get him to sleep through the noise of the upstairs ruckus. He grew up big and he grew up right, with a gut filled with the finest of Pittsburgh steel. This gentle monster of nineteen years had a reputation known by everyone from Jackson to New Orleans. But there was very few who knew him by his real name, who knew his real nature.

It was the way his name came out in the cold, by the friendly voice from home, when it dawned on Charlie Stedman. "No … it can't be." Even though he denied it, there was a big grin on his face. He began to chuckle with all the happiness in the world. "Oh no!" He laughed with a loud echoing clap of his hand.

"I'm afraid it is …" The young man smirked.

The figure tipped up his hat with a finger to reveal his face in the bright reflection. The young man had achieved an artificial olive complexion after three years in the hot, dusty, and sun beaten American South and Southwest. He considered it quite a feat considering his parents. It was hard to compare the young boy that Charlie met in a box car out of Memphis, and the young adult in front of him. Made somewhat more challenging by the relatively new talon lacerations that scared across his left eye and a gash across the bridge of his nose. But even then, he'd never forget the one person who he had owed and changed his life.

The younger gave him a sudden punch to the stomach with a smack. But Charlie was unaffected, only smiling ear to ear, as the other pulled back. He gave a painful chuckle as he shook his hand. When he looked up they both laughed, the teenager offering his damaged hand to shake. But the Goliath only smacked it away, and instead, roared in joy, bear hugging the smaller boy. He lifted him off his feet, making primal noises, as he shook him. Meanwhile, behind the rope, the finely dressed people watched on in confusion, frowning smirks, or outright disapproval at the show of raw emotions at the happy reunion. After all, no proper English Gentlemen would ever make such a display in public.

It was all very American.

"Alright … Alright!" The teenager chuckled, patting the big boy on the shoulders. With a loud clack, the young man's soles hit the pavement where he dropped. Wobbling on his feet, the teen clumsily got his balance, before giving a sputtered breath visible on the winter's night. With a muted noise, he braced Charlie by his shoulders. He gazed over at his tux with a shake of his head in mocking tease.

"Look at you, two years at 'The Sketch' and Aunt Edith turns you respectable." He clapped the broad shoulders after dusting them off playfully.

There was something emotional and passionate in the deepest affection in the way two big hands grabbed the young man's lapels. "Son of a bitch …" He got a good look at the teenager. "Son of a bitch!" He let out a loud cackle and shook him hard. "I thought I had a hell of night ahead o'me, and then here comes Buck Rogers himself, walkin at me, back from the future!" He laughed out loud. He gave the young man a jovial push, teeth clenched in unbridled joy.

"Miss me did you?" He sighed, pushing him back. There was an arrogant confidence in his voice.

At the sound of youthful smugness, the older clicked his teeth, and made his face go stoic. "Me?" He pointed to himself. "Hell no!" He waved his hand at him dismissively. "I was sure you were gonna end up on the wrong side of some Okie dust eater's shotgun down on Route 66, had money on it too." Lead Belly sounded almost disappointed when he crossed his arms.

They both glared at one another in mock animosity. But it couldn't hold in the shared history that came from such triumphs and sorrows of their time together on the road, in the bayou, and fighting the good fight against men in white hoods outside of New Orleans. They couldn't stop laughing. All those hard times, sad nights, and hungry days were made all the sweeter by what they were standing in front of, what life had rewarded.

Charlie clamped his big hands on the boy's shoulders. "George, Goddamn, Crawley!" He yelled out to the sky with a laugh. "Back again, baby …" He shook his head in reverence of the moment. He folded up his arm and offered him his straight hand. Without hesitation George took it with a forceful clamp in brotherhood.

One last time the two young men embraced hard. "Damn good to see you, Charlie!" He said giving hard pats on the massive back of the emotional youth. When they broke apart, the large boy had a tear in his eye. He sniffed hard, remembering such a small boy, so filled with sorrow and regret, sitting all alone in a box car with nothing but a bundle of some clothing in a messenger bag, an old stuffed doggy, and the "Ray Gun" in his jacket pocket. He would never have thought he'd owe that sad little kid his life. Yet, after so many adventures, so many fights, shared experiences, good and bad, they were back together on the best night of Charlie Stedman's life.

When they parted George motioned his head inside. "Jonah, here?" He asked.

The boy sucked his teeth. "You think we could've gotten this club up without him? It was his dream, wasn't it?" he asked in mock offense.

"I remember …" George replied.

Like he could forget the fireside chats, looking up at the thousands of stars in the Louisiana sky. Everyone had a dream back then, Money, buying the farm back, a nice steak, just a cherry pie like Grandma used to make … a mama's hugs. They would all say what they wanted when they could go home again. But here, this nightclub, was a testament to all the dreams of the lonely, sad, and cast out vagabond children living in an abandoned gothic plantation manor.

The two young men clapped hands again in parting. "Now, you stick'in around …?" He pointed at George in warning of any answer other than the right one.

"I Wouldn't miss it for the world." He smirked. "First rounds on me …" He promised.

"Yes, sir! The best party in this here London Town don't start till closing time, George Crawley!" He called with jovial teasing and excitement at his disappearing friend. George turned, walking backward toward the doors, and gave Charlie a cocky two fingered salute in acknowledgement and agreement.

As he passed the crowd behind the roped off barrier, they all stared in shock. They knew the name George Crawley, but this wasn't who they were expecting. Seeing a familiar three figures standing under a shield of umbrellas, George turned without breaking stride. "Lord and Lady Gillingham, Mr. Blake." He tipped his hat to Lord Anthony Gillingham, Lady Mabel Lane Gillingham, and Mr. Charles Blake. They were all barely any older than he remembered them from their days nipping at his mother's rear end whenever she passed. He opened one of the double doors to a chorus of applause from inside, before he gave them a cocky nod.

They all watched the young man pass with surprise on their faces. The group of friends was not the only surprised figures in line. Those of London society who didn't know the Crawley's personally at least knew of George Crawley, heir to Lord Grantham and the majestic castle of Downton Abbey. After seven years missing from any knowledge or prospect of the British Peerage, many Lords and Ladies thought the young man to be dead. He was only kept alive through rumor to keep the hounds off the scent of the odd, yet beyond fair, Honorable Sybil Branson and the fortune and status she'd gain upon her Grandfather and Aunt's deaths. It was often reported around the teas and dinners at Belgrave Square of this George Crawley's many outlandish and fantastical adventures that it was hard to tell what was true anymore.

Each time the stories changed, He was killed when union workers attacked the Levinson Mansion in Cincinnati during the Stock Market Crash of '29. Next, they were shocked further to hear he did survive the crash, only to have been killed by Pinkerton thugs when they shot up and burned down San Sochi, an international incident that was widely covered in both New York and London newspapers. But a year later, during a dinner party in Downton, the Peerage was shocked to learn that the heir was still alive and in New Orleans. Once again, those who were looking to snatch up the ancient home of House Grantham cursed and returned to the weeds. The intrigue only deepened to learn that the American FBI had come to Grantham House in London during the season. They questioned Lord and Lady Grantham about the whereabouts of their grandson. Later, a most fascinating and imaginative story circulated of a group of hobo children living at Mrs. Levinson's plantation, fighting a Guerilla war against a cultist preacher and Klu Klux Klan members. The reports of this were substantiated when Lady Grantham and Lady Edith immediately left for New Orleans, only to return a month later, furious, and accompanied by a group of Southern American adolescents, none of them George Crawley. Now the rumors once again circulated that the Heir of Grantham, now a famed horse racer, had been involved in a shootout with ex-members of Poncho Via's Revolutionary Army while at a Mexican town on the Texas Border. Lord Charles Blake said it best at a London dinner of the growing folk hero that the young, heart eyed, British debutantes were turning him into.

"This George Crawley is other cracked or he might be the most interesting fellow who ever lived. Either way, it might be best he's kept away from London during the season at all costs … the other poor chaps wouldn't stand a chance."

" _South of the border - down Mexico way  
That's where I fell in love, where the stars above - came out to play  
And now as I wander - my thoughts ever stray  
South of the border - down Mexico way!"_

The teen had forgotten just how cold England was till he entered the heated confines of the building. For a long moment he stood at the entrance, observing his surroundings. The doorway flanked by two fake trees and a reception station on the left. Electricity was surging through the swinging nightclub when the young man entered. A loud horn carried a long note before the entire band launched into an energetic New Orleans jazz set. There were cheers and the clatter of heels and loafers on a tile dance floor as piano, clarinet, upright bass, and drums lit the place on fire. "The Runaway" had a cloud of smoke hanging over the blue and gold décor. A metal barrier of gilded elegance separated the large circular dance floor. Built against the barrier were brown leather booths for the people who needed to be close to the action, in case they heard something hot and just had to get out there. Watching behind the golden barrier were fancy and lordly parties at tables with white table cloths and table lamps. Waiters in vest and slacks carrying trays of drinks and Cigarette Girls in double breasted uniform coat, fez, nylon miniskirts, and fishnets moved passed tables, serving the customers dressed in tuxedoes and evening gowns. Their eyes were glued to the musicians on the far end of the crowded dance floor. The bandstand was occupied by a Cuban on the trumpet, an adolescent black boy on clarinet, a Creole on the upright base, an Irishmen on drums, and a young, blond, southern man with a sweet voice like honey and rhythms as hot as a pepper.

" _She was a picture - in old Spanish lace  
Just for a tender while, I kissed a smile - upon her face  
'Cause it was fiesta - and we were so gay  
South of the border - Mexico way!"_

There was just a smirk on George's face at the song. His memories of November in Mexico were filled with beautiful and shadowy Adobe and limestone buildings of Spanish architecture lit by gaslight. A town filled with beggars, prostitutes, throat cutters, and honest citizens trying to make enough money from the idiot tourists who had crossed a river to the deceptively beautiful and rough Mexican town for a different kind of fun. He remembered the two storied and grandiose hacienda whore house, filled with filthy, ruthless, and deadly mercenaries in sombreros who hadn't had their fill of drink and blood in their losing Civil War. A Day of the Dead parade in Mexico was a hard thing to forget, all the fireworks and a hundred skull face painted people in costume dancing down the street. But it was even harder to forget the sight of Lady Edith Crawley in full wedding dress and skull paint helping in the rescue of Tom Branson who was tied to a chair, being fed beans, tortillas, and hot beer by topless, high-end, prostitutes. The mercenaries and their whores downstairs, arguing over what to charge Lord Grantham for ransom. But George knew better. It had been all a ploy to get him out in the open by a Turkish Assassin who had set the whole thing up for a Princess's bounty of Persian Gold.

" _Then she smiled as she whispered "ma'ana"  
Never dreaming that we were parting  
Then I lied as a whispered "ma'ana"  
'Cause our tomorrow never came!"_

"He's great isn't he?"

The young man turned around at the love loran voice. A gorgeous young blond hostess shared the view with the young man as they stared at the bandstand. She was smacking chewing gum and had a fake beauty mark on her cheek. There was something uniformed about her dress, that said formal, but still an employee. Going back and forth it was clear that the girl was smitten with the singer.

"If you only knew him when I did …" George said with a private snort handing the girl his hat and old navy blue scarf which he assumed she was there for.

James "Jimmy" McMurray had been hit hard by the Depression. Before then, his family had survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, only to lose it all in the Stock Market when his father invested in machinery and agricultural technology. By the time he was ten, his whole family had been hit with disease and he was the only one left. He was lucky enough that his young black maid had loved him like a son. She might have done some things she wasn't proud of behind some gin joints and lumber mills during lunch time, but she made enough money to sustain Jimmy and herself. It also curried favor for getting them gigs at the Honkey Tonks around Baton Rouge. Before the collapse, Jimmy's Momma thought he'd be a great pianist, playing the grand concert halls. But years later he was playing at colored bars with his former maid with a voice like a song bird. In truth, the fear of the crowd when they first started eventually turned to a dragon he'd chase. When George, Jonah, and Charlie first met Jimmy, he was looking for Big'ole Joe, the town's Lothario, even thinking of imploring the helping hand of the Klan to find him. He swore by the love of Leticia, that he'd never give a spit to that kind of ignorance. But it was Big'ole Joe who got her hooked on those "powdered pills" and one day he found her naked and unmoving, her mouth foamed over. The only person he had left in the world and she had overdosed on that fat som'a'bitch's powder. He'd fight him if he could've, and he had tried. But when George knew Jimmy, he was short, squat, and impossibly overweight. He had big red cheeks and a scowl on his face permanently. The boys at the bars had called him "Rolly Polly" and he had been laughed out of the dive that Big'ole Joe sat his rear in every afternoon. The nervous, fidgety, young boy with a smooth voice when sound met the microphone, regretfully let his new friends talk him out of going to the KKK in his rage and to let go of his search for vengeance. He instead joined George and the rest of the boys' quest to Martha and Cora Levinson's Plantation …

Now in just three years he was a fit, trim, and handsome teenage idol.

George looked out at the bandstand and shook his head at the youth that had every girl in London eating out of his hands. He wasn't sure if his Momma would be proud of her boy, but he knew Leticia would. With a proud grin of his own, George ran his hand through his shoulder length black curls, letting the heat run through his cold scalp. Opening his mouth, he turned to the hostess to ask after her boss. But she was holding his hat and scarf to her cleavage, completely enthralled with the singer.

"Never mind …" the youth sighed in annoyance walking away from the stricken hostess. For a second of disbelief, George wondered if he had gone completely insane at the notion that Jimmy McMurray, of all people, had the attention of a dame instead of him.

Hands in his jacket pockets, he walked into the crowded chaos of the nightclub. Right by the door was a metal and glass bar that had a sleek and streamline look to it. Many posh patrons had gathered there to talk under and over the music, either to get away from their dates, or to find a new one. An amused smirk touched the youth's lips when he saw something in the distance. He walked into a divided area from the rest of the club. Anywhere else it might have been a VIP section. There were still tables in this part of the bar, offering a little more privacy toward the front, but they were by no means secluded from the interested passerby. George Crawley stopped and observed the many framed newspaper headlines and articles on the wall that surrounded a picture and a plaque underneath.

The glassy eyes of nostalgia hit him as a fond, but sad smile overcame his face when he saw what all of it was.

All the headlines had come from different newspapers in New Orleans and as far away as Knoxville. It talked of lynching's being broken up by Roman Candles, the hangman escaping. There was one of Lynch Mobs being ambushed with hunting and squirrel guns on their way for night raids on sharecropping farms. There were one or two flyers of local missing dogs, and then a picture of a red faced shop owner standing in front of his store where a bowl of stew sat in front of him with 'mystery meat' inside. A dark humor fell over George's face when he read the corresponding headline _**"Local Menaces Send Community Message, Eat Local Coon Dogs."**_ He remembered the Klan member throwing the bowl at the photographer after taking the picture. **"REBELS STRIKE AGAIN!"** was a headline in big, bold, and offended letters. In the picture to the story was a political candidate on the stage of a small theater, his face in panic, glasses skewed, as firework sparks exploded in the frame. But George smiled in reverie at the small group of white and black kids with shit eating grins in outrage grey, fake, neck beards hurrying through the chaos to the backdoor exit behind the stage. Finally, was a full spread front page picture of FBI Agents in starched suits and fedora hats, leading other men in white robes at Tommy Gun point into paddy wagons parked in front of an old white washed southern gothic mansion. The Klu Klux Klan members, bloody, soaking wet, and covered in gashes and bruises looked humiliated.

In the center of the framed headlines was an actual picture. If George Crawley closed his eyes he could still feel the muggy heat of the Louisiana summer. On the eve of the final battle, with the whole might of the local chapter of 'good ole' boys' coming for them, they all decided to take a picture to mark the occasion. In the black and white frame were elven figures, the oldest sixteen, the youngest was eight. They were a group of seven boys and four girls of whites, blacks, and a mixture of both. All of them were homeless children. Tragic stories of dead mommas and daddy's in prison, loving families who just couldn't afford to take care of them, parents that just didn't want to be, and orphans. Every consequence of this Depression was represented in the faces and the names of the members of their group. They were dressed in surplus tin hats and ammo belts buckled across their chests from abandoned storerooms left over from The Great War. Some of them were saluting like the soldiers their daddies had been in France, others of different races and genders looked like brothers and sisters with arms around the other's shoulders. But there wasn't an ounce of fear or doubt in all the smiling or serious faces that met the camera and battle that day. Maybe they had read too many dime novels and Pulps, listened to too many radio programs about fictional heroes that they hadn't believed, in their small hearts, were make believe. But standing there that day, that hour, that minute, there wasn't a boy or girl that doubted what they had been and were about to do the right thing.

The Democrat and socialist publications had called them obstructionists, Republican radicals, and terrorist guerrillas. Many columns in prominent Southern papers called to the examples of the evils of this Depression, by sighting them, and their involvement in the trampling of a "sacred culture and heritage" with each ambush of 'meetings' they had. Led by the son of a jailbird sharecropper and a nameless boy escaped from Fifth Avenue only referred to as "Buck Rogers" on account of his "Ray Gun", the freed-man's Republican papers coined the Robin Hood group of young vagabond rebels as …

"The Runaways"

It could be three years, it could be ten, and it could be hundred, but George Crawley could still remember the names, faces, likes, dislikes, smell, and laughs of every member of their group. He'd never forget them, because there was no one else who would remember them. Eighty years from now, a hundred, no one would remember what they had done. There would be no schools dedicated to them, no ticker tape parades, or national holidays. Just six coffins filled too soon, with the peaceful bodies of children that no one would come to claim. Now all that was left of them was what he remembered, and this nightclub that would always bear their collective names and what they stood for. It had been three years, and the hurt was still felt as fresh as the first and last funeral he went too. The heavy weight of guilt fell over him as he stared at the smiling faces saluting the camera in their soldier's gear. An emotional scoffed laugh of disbelief escaped his throat at the brass plaque that was embedded under their picture.

" _ **I don't know when I'm coming home or if I'll ever be home again. But I do know that wherever I am, I have a responsibility to make it a better place. And that's what I'm gonna do. So what do you say, men? Let's go make it a better place, one firecracker at a time."**_

A shaky hand touched the quote. It was the first thing that was drilled into the walls of this place. It encapsulated everything that the 'The Runaways' represented. They were too young to be spoiled by the reality of their world, too young to compromise their principles, and too young to understand the dangers of their fight. It was the perfect melding of ignorance and bravery. All fueled by the words of a thirteen year old boy that had been desperate to redeem himself from the wicked act he had done in New York. He had been brash, angry, and careless with his life and the lives of others. And now here he was, standing in a monument dedicated to his stupidity. How many of his friends would still be here had he not convinced himself that he could still be a defender of the downtrodden … still be a hero?

"Something a child would say …"

George lamented quietly under his breath at his own shiny and gilded words in front of him. They may have cleaned the Klan out of the area, but Jim Crow was still on the books, sweaty farmers were still pushing dirt were things weren't growing at fifteen cents on the dollar. And his friends, children, were still cut down by men with such reckless hate in their hearts. Wordlessly, the teenager gave one last glance at the picture of the brave faces of children soldiers in a meaningless war. He headed back the way he came thinking that maybe this was all a mistake.

"Well, well, well … look what the cat dragged in, boys!"

There was a hard, tough guy, voice behind a bass Italian soprano, smooth and measured. George knew it. He turned to his right to see a party sitting at one of the tables in the secluded areas. The man in question was stocky with big broad shoulders. He had black hair that was slicked back and an authentic olive oil complexion. He wore a pin stripe suit made of silk and had a large stogie in his chompers. But the most disguising thing about the man was the horrible stitched up scar that ran across his eye that was nearly bulged out of its socket. It was an old injury, but the disfigurement could never be corrected, at least not with the half-price doctor in the Brooklyn back alleys that sewed him back together.

"Apollo …" George nodded in a friendly façade that was cold as ice.

He moved toward the table occupied by the usual toughs in suits and bowlers, a few well-dressed club girls looking for a good time. The ostentatiously dressed man, brought to mind the new money swells of the Gilded Age. Surrounded by Lords and Ladies of the last existing aristocracy, he had let the insecurities of a once small time smuggler be aired in the open. He gave a show in clothing that had no tact of style beyond the excess of money. Roman Apollo blew thick, chimneys stacks, of smoke from the corner of his mouth as he eyed the young man.

"What's movin', Georgie!" They shook hands. The gangster may have been nothing but cordial, but George didn't trust him for a minute … especially with their history.

"Same as usual, Roman, you know me … Running and gunning, racing and chasing." George said with an easy smoothness.

"Sounds about your speed … which was always fast." the big man chuckled puffs of smoke, seemingly liking the teen's style.

The young man paused when he looked up at one of the gangster's body guards. The familiar man had an old sailor look to him that had every inch of salt for the teen in front of him. He may have been in his late forties or early fifties, a pot belly gut, but it came with an old workingman's impossible strength. But currently he had two healing black eyes where someone had kicked him with both feet in the face, and a clubbed cast on his right hand where it had been smashed by a slamming door. George knew all this …

Because, he was the one who had done it.

There was just a hint of a knowing smirk that slipped past the chomped cigar. He turned to the pug nosed thug behind him. "Kermit, I know you ain't mean mugging, Georgie, here?!" He chastised with a bombastic threatening nature. The older man glanced at the thick shouldered knuckle dragger and stood a little straighter under the deadly gaze of the bulging, grotesque, eye.

"Naw, Boss, he's good." He shook his head.

Removing the cigar from his yellowed and golden teeth, the man pointed the lit end at his employee. "Kermit, you mean mugging, Georgie, ain't you?!" He pushed showily.

"Naw, Boss, honest! He just looks like someone I thought I knew, is all …" He trailed off, nervously airing out his collar.

"Good, cause, you see, me and Georgie go way back. I ain't standing for no mooks, especially my mooks, given no lip to my old friends!" He chastised. "Ya'see back in America, Georgie might have been your everyday Pisano, but here, he's practically goddamn royalty, ain't ya … some kinda Duke?" The mobster asked.

"Earl …" George corrected keeping a careful eye at the other thugs with their own injuries and private looks of discontent.

The man nodded in agreement. "See, Kermit, an Earl. You even breath on him wrong, and they clip your sorry ass to the Tower of London. See?" His whole frame was intimidating, his voice the very definition of threatening.

"Yeah, boss, you got it." He nodded obediently, keeping his eyes straight.

The man didn't even hide the smug look when he turned back to George who looked completely unimpressed with the act. There was no mistaking what was going on here. Just like dinner parties in Downton, when it came to organized criminals, you never said what you felt, what you said behind someone's back … and everyone was your best friend. More to the point, it was an unspoken admission that this wasn't New York, Newport, or New Orleans.

This was a truce.

"The guys I pick up, you know what I mean …?" He blew a raspberry, jabbing a thumb at his muscle. "Makes me miss the old days, you remember?" Apollo motioned to the seat across from him.

"Vaguely …" He shook his head at the offer.

When his Aunt Edith had left New York after Valentine's Day, reestablishing contact with him in late 1930, Rose and Atticus had come to live with him. After a year of being alone and desperately poor, George had come to know how to live on the most minimum of means. However, the same could not be said for the Aldridge's, especially Rose. His aunt had never been without money in her life. Before the Flintshers had lost it all, Rose had come to live at Downton, in which Lord Grantham assumed financial responsibility for her. When she had married and moved away, Atticus was making outstanding money. So, it was, two years after the Stock Market Crash, that their savings had been depleted.

It had been tough sledding, the first three months of them living with him. Rose had wanted to ask Lord Grantham or Lord Sinderby for money, but Atticus refused. He just wasn't able to show weakness to his father by admitting that he, the future Lord Sinderby, could not provide for his family. There was a lot of crying and slamming doors. Even in the grand, place like, mansion, there was no escaping the echo of shouted voices. Atticus would take their daughter with him and shut the door, while Rose would scream from the outside. Then, she'd storm across the mansion to the other wing and into George/Cora's room and flop on him or his bed if he wasn't in it, and cry. She'd tell him how petrified she was of becoming cruel and vapid like her shrill 'mommy'. Having not been alive for most marriages that had happened in his family before someone died, George didn't quite know how to handle it. But he did know that if Rose was sleeping with him at night more than she was her husband in a month, than something was wrong.

George had been receiving an allowance to live off from his mother … which he knew to really be his Granny and Donk. But he hadn't expected to be supporting Rose and Atticus as well. Sleeping night after night cuddled by Rose, hearing her cry in her sleep, knowing that Susan's mockingly shrill voice was taunting "Cora's little whore" in her dreams made George feel awful for her. He didn't know anything about marriage, but he was determined to save Rose and Atticus's.

During his time struggling to survive a year in New York alone, George had come to meet quite a few shady characters. There were ways of making some fast cash in the intrepid life of smuggling and bootlegging. And there was no one better at paying on the drum than small time operator, Roman Apollo. George had helped with a few shipments in his time and was in high demand after a few jobs. But he had quit when his Aunt Edith had finally found him. But he returned to bootlegging for the speakeasies of Hell's Kitchen when jobs were short for Atticus. He began quietly supporting the rich children of privilege that were never taught how to survive in oblivion. After a few runs, the boy put some money in the man's hand. He gave no answers, and allowed no questions. He simply told Atticus to make it right. All it took was a romantic dinner, a carriage ride through Central Park, and the moonlight. Though, George would live to regret it, when he came down for water and found that the couple couldn't make it past the grand staircase without making love to one another. Thus, forever cementing the fact that Lady Rose was the first completely naked woman George had ever seen. Nine months later, Lord Hugh Robert Aldridge was born in a cab on 32nd street, delivered by George, who once again, could never unsee the things Rose showed him.

Eventually the animosity between George and Roman began when the boy decided to retire again. At the time Roman was getting bigger, shipments getting fatter, and there was enough money for "aggressive expansion" of the business against the old families of the five boroughs. At the time, Rose was working the fashion department at the Macys on 34th street, Atticus was accounting part-time at 'The Planet' where George was selling papers, and there was a baby and a small child in the house. It had been one thing to make extra money for everyone, it was another when they really didn't need it anymore. It also didn't help that his freelance service was starting to become franchised by an organized crime ring. Thus, George felt that the danger wasn't worth the trouble anymore. It seemed cut and dry at the time, no one, not even the criminal elements of Depression Era New York, respected a man who'd put a bounty on a child. But after rescuing Rose from the Knickerbockers, it didn't escape George's notice that someone had tipped off the Pinkertons about where he lived. As San Sochi burned, George could never forget the grudge born that night.

The last time that George had crossed blades with Roman Apollo was after the war with the cultist preacher and the Klan. Lady Grantham and Lady Hexham had been trapped in New Orleans. They had lost their money and jewels to a thief that had been masquerading as a hotel maid, nearly salivating at the news of a British Marchioness and a Countess being hosted. Both Cora and Edith's jewels and diamonds were insured, but the insurance company didn't do transatlantic business. To collect the money, they had to go back to England. It was a plan that would require sending letters and photographs across the sea to Lord Grantham, who would have to go to London, and from the Insurance office, travel to New Orleans. It was a process that would leave both women penniless for a month.

As was the case in most places that George stayed, he had his ear to the ground, making contacts and befriending with interesting characters here and there. Cashing in a few favors that the young heir had accumulated in the year of living in and around New Orleans, George gotten himself entered into a horse race. The winnings were more than enough for the two women he loved to get back home, and to change his remaining friends' fortunes with them. However, the night before the race, he met Apollo again. Looking to expand his business dealings down the Mississippi, the gangster and some of his "new clients" had a line on an opposing horse. He was willing to cut his 'old friend' in on the scam to insure its success. He just had to take a fall in the race. George told him for double the price, he could pull on the reins. The man smiled and nodded, giving the boy a little extra than agreed upon to make sure it all went without a hitch.

However, the next day, all those big wigs in New Orleans would've loved to scalp someone when George swept the race. Without anyone knowing, the boy had taken Roman's capital and went around town betting heavily … on himself. Collecting thousands of dollars on the line share, George paid round trip for his Granny, Aunt, and his friends to go to England. Then, taking the rest of the cash, George disappeared like a phantom in the fog. A suddenly cash poor Roman Apollo, humiliated, his dealings in Gulf of Mexico trade obliterated, hit the roof. He left New Orleans a wanted man himself, when every gambler in the 'Big Easy' was looking for the idiot who blabbered about the fix to one of the racers. Apollo, along with very thug and enforcer up and down the coast, searched every European bound ship from New Orleans to Mobile, looking for the double-crosser. But George had been gone for days, jumping a one-way train out of the South and to Austin and the Texas Hill Country.

Neither had forgotten what one had done to the other, but sadly, Apollo wasn't stupid. He knew that in England, especially London, the outsider would be up a creek if he tried to start anything with the heir to the House of Grantham. But their prejudices lay deep within the smirking and cold conversations.

"What are you doing, this far off the map?" George asked with the ghost of flippancy.

The man nodded to himself as he drank from a glass. "Got invested in one of those _Roger Sinclair_ pictures. Boy's good, from your neck of the woods, I hear. Gonna get himself married in London. They're throwing a big Hollywood engagement party up north somewhere … got an invite." He winked slyly at him as if George was on the level about what he was 'really' talking about. "His girl is a real looker, real _ice queen_ , ya'know? But still, wouldn't mind a piece of that Shepard's Pie. OH! No offense, there, Georgie." He shook his shoulders in humor at the still confused look on George's face about what he was talking about. All he had to do is look to the assortment of social climbers to get a few laughs from his squad of silk and diamond bunnies with British beaked noses.

The teen gave a quirked eyebrow at the over-reaction of his party and the insulation that somehow who some Nazi sympathizer like Roger Sinclair was sleeping with in Hollywood had to do with George. "What's the old saying about "Once a crook"? They really think your name in the credits of some melodramatic 'sword and sandal' picture is gonna make you something? I guess they just don't know you like I do, Apollo." George's words were wielded like a rapier of a night time avenger.

The jovial humor left the man's face. "Right … right …" The gangster didn't defend himself harboring a deep darkness in his squint eyes as he drew the words out. "You know …" The New York Sicilian let out ugly smog of smoke from his maw. "I heard an interesting story about you." He pointed his cigar at the youth.

To this George snorted lightly in youthful arrogance. "Oh yeah?" He humored him dismissively. "Which one?" He motioned to him with his head.

The gangster's chair creaked as he leaned back. Rather than finish his story, he turned to a pretty red haired girl. She was about George's age, he could tell by the fact that she was trying too hard to sell she was anything but. She had too much makeup on, her bust was stuffed, and her out of style evening gown wasn't fitted. It was either stolen, or it was her mother's. Either way, somehow she had grifted her way into the first class. By the way the older man's hand caressed her thighs, she seemed used to being touched by old men, their gifts putting food and favor on some impoverished peer's table. But worst of all, if George could spot it, so could Apollo. He was getting quid-pro-quo Aristocratic jailbait. The teenage youth knew he was doing it as some sort of brag, as was everything he did. A man like him would do anything to show off that he was just as good as any Lord and Lady in the joint, even if it was taking full advantage of some poor girl with a once noble last name.

"It might not be about you … now that I think of it." He continued, allowing the girl to caress his chest in kitten like affection. It was all just an act to get a rise out of the boy. He was here, in his town, and picking up 'his' type of women. He could've made George laugh. These people weren't his, they were his Donk and Granny's, his mother's … but never his.

"Story down on Easy Street, old preacher, spent the last three years traveling around Mississippi, running from the Feds. Make'in his bones touring Baptist church after Baptist church, giving a good 'Fiery Sermon' … getin' folks right for that great getin' up morning, for that judgment day!" The gangster did his best Southern Cracker impersonation that got the whole table laughing. "He and a couple of them 'boys' in bed sheets went back down to the Big Easy to get something he forgot, a valuable ruby. A couple days later they found him dead inside some underground crypt in the French Quarter Graveyard, head bashed in, couple of his boys shot dead. Heard the police figure it was a _Webley MK IV_. One of these boys said that the preacher man fingered the kid who did it during the fight. He goes by the name of, uh … Buck Rogers."

He let the name hang in the air. The big shouldered Sicilian was telling the story more to his girls than George. He made it seem like he was telling a scary campfire tale about a monster worthy of Shelley or Mr. Hyde. He was trying to point out to himself, more than his fake retinue, that the future English Lord was no different than himself.

Always trying to convince everyone, even himself, that no one was great than Roman Apollo.

"What does that have to do with me?" George smirked with a deadly frigidness.

"Heh …" Apollo laughed smugly. "Can you believe this guy?" He turned to Kermit, the injured muscle, cocking his head back at George. "Did I forget to mention that this preacher was some kinda, wacko, real nut job, ya'know? According to the G-Men, he used to be some 'Grand Wizard' in Big O several years ago. Hard times busted the chump, and he started looking for something. Something big, something expensive, something **Jew** , you know? Killed the old lady it belonged too, an old woman with some big 'to-do' daughter round these parts. Then, later, he killed a couple of kids at her house when they picked a fight with him. "Runaways" I hears it, huh? But, eh, between guys like you and me, Georgie, what's one old Jew lover, a few cracker kids, and a couple little niggers anyway, right …?"

He was waiting for the young man to snap, to come after him. The Sicilian knew what he was doing, what he was fishing with. It was the same old line on George Crawley that went back to his childhood. He had his grandfather and Aunt Sybil's temper. It wasn't easy to do, but if you found the right pressure point, you'd see the boy let the demon out. For years Roman had wondered about Van Houten house, and he'd like nothing better than to see what they saw. There was an old saying in the nurseries of Belgrave Square. It was warning that you played with fire if you had the inclination to bully Marigold Drewe, because her champion, George Crawley, would find you eventually in some park or school ground and make you eat every horrible thing said to the pretty little thing.

For a second there was a burning fire of the blackest flames behind his Granny and Aunt's eyes at the racist words mocking the people closest to him. Slowly, menacingly, he walked up to the big man with the cigar. The table creaked when he put a hand down and leaned to get eye level with him. His men around him reached inside their jackets. But the gangster only lifted his hand to stop them, smirking the entire time.

"Sounds to me that some piece of shit stain on life's crotch, that beat old women and children to death, got what was coming to him. I'd watch my back, you sorry, Guinea slob, cause we all get what we deserve in the end."

The table creaked with the release of pressure when the teen slowly lifted himself back up. There was a pure aggressive elation on the mobster's face, and look of pure hatred in his eyes as he watched as the boy walked away with cold deadliness. He blew smoke the young man's way and leaned back in his chair with a creak.

"I forgot to tell you …" He called after him. George paused, his back to the table. "There was a friend of yours that was making the rounds at the old places. Said he was looking for you, and he'd pay a lot of money for any assistance. He goes by the name of Pamuk, Alemdar Pamuk. I hope you didn't mind that me and the boys gave him a ride to Newport, showed him the old manor. I heard you boys had quite the party. The way they tell it, no one seen the old Levinson palace quite so swinging and alight since Ms. Cora's sweet sixteen ball." Roman tapped his disfigured eye where George's scars were. The glowing embers of the cigar reflected in the bulging iris.

At the mention of the name Pamuk, a red, burning pain shot through his healing wounds on George's handsome face. The flash of the fiery explosion of the manor in Newport and the running duel on the train during the escape caused George to tighten his hand in a fist. There was a look of promise on the gangsters face when he saw the violence. But George just nodded, his back still to the smug gangster, as he walked away.

There was a feeling of anger when the underage debutant said something about George as he left. He felt the sting of obnoxious laughter as he walked back toward the bar. He nursed a bruised ego, a burned pride, and the swirling of a dark adolescent temper. George Crawley was the angriest of angry young men that had ever been tempered in youth. Since Fort Worth, his sadness had turned to a ceaseless anger that bordered on rage. In any other day, Roman Apollo, wouldn't have been able to scratch his armor. But without the girl he loved, without his future, without Marigold, he felt lost. After his fights in New Orleans and Newport, he just couldn't get it out of his system. He felt on edge all the time and he hated everyone and everything. He hated his Aunt Edith for being the hammer that broke his heart. He hated his family for all the lies they willingly kept from him when he put his heart, soul, and future in the love of a girl he now knew he could never have. It was just one more check on a long list of things these people, this life, had stolen from him.

He sucked in breath as he touched his scars, feeling like something hot and liquid was running off them. They glistened and were visible in the neon lights off the bar. People were staring as he made his way through the crowds. It had been a tough couple of weeks and he felt tired. Eight years of eastern and central standard time in America made him a stranger to 'the island's' time now that he was home. Taken with healing from the beatings he had taken lately, all he wanted to do was sleep. But when he did, all he could do was dream of her, and then he'd wake up praying for the dawn, knowing that when he shut his eyes Marigold was all he'd see.

"Hey, mub, there's a strict dressed code in this establishment."

He heard someone with a funny, euro trash, accent accost him from behind. Pained, sad, and angry, George didn't have the time or the patience to deal with some over-zealous employee. "It's alright, pal, Charlie let me in." He didn't turn, waving him off. He continued to the bar when someone poked his shoulder.

"I said there's a dress code, mub!" He said louder.

The teenager glared. "Then, go get the owner and we'll talk it out." He exasperated, still not turning as he moseyed up to the bar and lifted a finger to get the bartender's attention.

"I call the police!"

Suddenly a hand grabbed his shoulder. All the baggage of memories and lost love, combined with the worst December anyone had ever had piled on him. He felt his teenage anger rise to danger levels, and a flash of rage crossed his features. With a swift spin, he slapped the hand off his shoulder and got into a boxing stance to hit the waiter. But he paused when his reaction got a familiar laugh.

Standing in front of him was a young and distractingly handsome black man in a white jacket tuxedo and black bow tie. He had a thin mustache under his pink lips, meant to hide his youth. There was a familiar swagger to him in public that had a cool stride to his step that went with whatever music was playing at the time. He'd dare say that he could sell that Appalachian music was in the very soul of his movements. When confronted with a young man ready to fight him, the older of the two only clapped his hands together and smiled.

"What are you gonna do with those hands, Swashbuckler?" The young man spoke with a smooth, southern bass that was like dripping honey.

George got a grudgingly playful look on his face, despite his weathered tiredness. "One of these day I'm gonna get me one of those pearly teeth, Jonah." He lowered his fists.

"Yeah, well, It ain't gonna be today though!" He laughed loud and with abandon of joy for all to turn and watch as he pulled the young man, with fists still raised, in a genuinely brotherly hug, rocking back and forth.

All the anger and hurt seemed to go away in the reunion of two old friends who embraced hard, patting one another on the back, and laughing. It seemed like a hundred years ago that some poor tween from Louisiana, living in a Hooverville in the back streets of Manhattan, had pulled the beaten master of San Sochi out of the snow and to the warmth of a barrel fire. Since then, for a long while afterward, the two had become the closest and oldest of friends. They were smuggling partners, paper boys, and freedom fighters together. Jonah had helped George get out of New York when the Pinkertons were after him. They traveled the whole country from Manhattan, to Harpers Ferry, to Memphis, and finally to New Orleans, never once questioning the depths they'd go for one another. They had saved each other's lives so many times they stopped counting … settling for outlandish number of the times, never questioning that it was probably true. In the youthful search for the meaning in a life, the two young men were at the purest form of their true selves in the presence of one another.

"When did you get here?" Jonah asked chuckling bombastically, bracing the younger by his leather clad shoulders.

George shot a thumb behind him. "Ah, this morning … got in from Liverpool last night, rough landing." He made it sound easy, knowing that it was anything but.

"I read in the morning post, that some two engine with American markings crashed landed just outside of Liverpool last night. I just knew that a dumb ass hog was involved." He shook his head.

"It's a long story." George looked to his boots rubbing the back of his neck.

Jonah nodded. "Ain't it always with you?" He winked, throwing an arm around George's shoulder. He got a good look at his best friend in the whole world and shook his head. George had grown, even in the almost three years they had been apart. The only thing that was the same was the constituency of markings from some old fight.

"I swear nothing ever changes …" He pointed to the scars. "Ya'still making friends where ever you go." There was something mockingly chastising in his voice. It didn't matter how old George had gotten, he still had the propensity to make people love or hate him with all the fires of hell. It was a curse and a blessing of a mother and father that had opposite effects on people.

But the jovial, happy reunion was halted by a sudden serious look that had just a hint of self-satisfaction in the twist of the ghost of a smirk on George's face. Though the smile remained on Jonah's, he frowned and turned his head confusion. If it was a stupid plan, at the poker table, or just playing a game of chess, it was never a good thing for the person he was smiling at.

"I got her …" Was all he said.

Suddenly, turquoise eyes, the evidence of a mixing of races in his ancestry, got wide. Jonah didn't need an explanation or description of what exactly the teenage boy was talking about. "Where is she?" He said seriously. To the question George's smirk grew to a grin in answer.

"Here?!" The owner of the club exclaimed. George nodded.

"Show me …"

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

 _"The Sultans of the Swing" - The Dire Straits_

" _South of the Border" – Any Jazz version_

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

I just want to take a moment, in this heated political climate, to make a disclaimer.

I'm not making a political statement at all in this story or in this chapter.

I've done much research on 1880's – 1940's history and politics for an original project I've been working on. And while some people will not want to hear it, or want it in the story, as it is Historical precedent for the location and relevant to the characters I feel I need to add it. I just wanted to be clear that this is coming from purely academic and researched knowledge of the areas in which the story takes place in the 1930's, not any sort of statement about today's politics.

So if you want to send hate, just don't sign in.


	14. Interlude: Part II - The Riddle of Steel

**Interlude: Part II**

 _The Riddle of Steel_

There was a comfort to the air that flowed like a river through the narrow spaces and dark places that set the scene. It wasn't cold, and it wasn't humid, but the air was thick and curdled in the southern Louisiana night. So smooth and soft, you felt like you could eat it. A night like tonight could make a man hungry. Make'em hungry for food, booze, to touch something soft and feminine. It energized and hypnotized, working its spell from the deep and dark foundations of a city that toted and worshiped something other than god. Most would say it was all an act, a gimmick for tourist money. But walking through the dark cobble stone, passing the empty southern mansions and ramshackled plantation houses that led to the water front, you'd know different. To look in their darkened windows and broken doors you might feel like something is watching you.

It's something old, something that had always been here. It was brought over by the snake worshipping islanders and black magic ceremonies of the African bush. This entity passes unseen in the dark corners, under the Cajun dive tables, and in the sewer tunnels. It danced below to the old horns that played the nights away, drawn to the soul in that sweet music like a honey bee with a poison sting. Enraptured by the heat of passion his presence was felt in the swirling darkness of the back alleys and forgotten jazz clubs where the bodies lie and the murderer laments. He slinks back underground as the police claim their man, waiting for next time. But now, in the suffering and inequity of this horrible Depression, he doesn't hide anymore. These streets are his. And his dominance is shown in the ivy covered railing and the cracked plaster of buildings. He wants a new drug. The night air, the atmosphere of anticipation, it was all ripe for satisfaction. From every rundown mansion and cracked standing mausoleum in the old graveyards, he looks on with a gleam in his eye and twinkle in his smile.

It's about to begin.

 _New Orleans_

 _1935_

Nestled between the hustle and bustle of the great and strange city as old as America herself, there was a solemn quiet that only hummed the hushed echo of the vibrancy of life at its very fullest. It was the noise of existence beyond the ramshackled stone monuments that lined the cracking and stained white pathway. In the distance the crickets chirped, the rustle of unseen movement flashed in the shadows under moonlight, and distant voices of the past in sorrow and anxiety's imagination conversed in the wind that whistled between the corroded stone of the old Graveyard. The cracking limestone and broken plaster were heaped in piles, eroded brick lay pinned under the tangle of weeds that broke through stone and wrapped rusting iron gates. Weathered faces of beautiful angel statues and the sinister shadows that fell over cherubs carved into stone watched the alleys in contemplation of the long decay of years that they've kept sentry over the reaper's landfill. While in the distance, a swirling darkness was forever on the peripheries of the borders of this land were life and death met at the swell of the brass band that played in its passing. Row upon row of standing graves led from alley, to canal, all the way down to the river front. Some brick and plaster ruins were so old that that ivy and moss obscured the forgotten names of the dead that were here long before the place even had a name. They were soldiers, priests, and pirates with French names and the same strange voodoo markers to keep the darkness from seeping through the cracks all around their little ramshackle alters by the bayou.

Swarms of lightning bugs and firefly filled the dark alleys, giving dim light to fading names, and creating strange illusions of half formed shadows shifting grave to grave, keeping the midnight watch over the sacred stone alters and markers. Before the ear could register the noise, there was a shift in the pattern of the glowing insects. In the distance came a low rhythmic beat that held steady, scattering and rearranging the order that the Lightning bugs had set for themselves. From the darkness, the thumping and shaking gave shape to dozens of dark figures walking slowly through the rows of the dead. Their path was lit by torchlight as they marched through the cracked stone walkways, down to the bay. Flickering flames reflected off the shiny brass of instruments in the hands of the parishioners that took up the calling for a slow and mournful bluesy jazz number. Each step was slow and respectful of not only the fallen, but the sacred ground around them. All of them were in rhythm with the ordered timpani of the drummers. Tall, elderly, black men in gray tails, black bowties, and white gloves led the reigns of two horses that rolled a Hearse down the narrow path. They lead the precession of jazz musicians and sulking old women with open parasols. Despite the darkness of night, not one of them, ever once, thought of breaking tradition.

The buzzing of the mournful tuba shook the path as the ghostly voices of the funeral parade took up the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" to the slow musician's song that filled the quiet night. It was an announcement of one more soul to join the party unseen, whose invite awaited all of us. As they passed, their shadowy faces were obscured in their slow mournful march. Standing behind the Hearse was a preacher with wild white hair and a neck beard of tight curls. The African descent resembled strongly in his forceful jaw and severe, primal, bone structure of his face. His eyes were so dark they nearly shined a supernatural black when he slowly turned to a watching figure leaning against a weathered tomb. The young man in a mahogany colored double breasted leather jacket and brown outback fedora met his gaze. Slowly, he removed his hat as the precession came up, giving the casket and the man of the cloth a nod of respect. Meeting the dark blue gaze with a spark of surprised humility at the defeating of his expectations of a young white man, he nodded back in gratitude. The preacher halted as the song ended, and for a moment there was not a word, the world still buzzing with the mournful bass off the close stone.

The preacher turned to the rest of the party still marching. He motioned his head to the dozens of players to be on the ready. Then, he walked to the casket, placing his hand on the cheap wood. "This one is for you, Jean-Paul, m'boy!" He turned back. "A'one, two, one, two, three!" He counted off.

Suddenly the mournful music and attitude ended with a loud whoop from the crowd as an upbeat and rambunctious sound came from every horn in the procession. A shot of celebration and energy filled the area as musician and mourner began to shake and dance with tasseled parasol. Five men came and picked the coffin off the wagon and as the parade continued they swung it back and forth, dancing with it as they continued to party under torchlight to the burial grounds. The young man, still leaning against a standing grave shack of stone, placed his hat on with a smirk. He nodded his head with the expert beat and timing of the catchy music. He watched the procession of old men, young mothers carrying young children they were dancing with, and old women with powerful voices adding spirit to the music as they shook their hips and clapped along.

Coming up behind the teenager to share the view was a lithe framed woman. Her curly chocolate locks were covered in a red beret, slim shoulders under a gray jacket decorated with plaid pattern and a white, silken, blouse. Her delicate hips swished with a red cotton skirt. She had a lovely and youthful face that was deceptive of her true age. Her dark green eyes were puzzled and astonished as she watched the parade start to disappear into the night, leaving a hum in the stillness of their wake. The teen side eyed the woman that was older than him by half, though one might never have guessed. He saw the alien like way she was viewing the things she just saw. Where she was from, where they were from, funerals were sad and dreary occasions. She had never thought of death as anything to celebrate. George Crawley could explain to the Honourable Madeleine Allsopp of the adaption of West African culture … but instead he'd settle for theirs being a sunnier disposition based on the differences and temperament due to better weather.

"Aren't they sad?" She asked George.

The young man walked around his leaning structure. "Wouldn't you be?" He asked rhetorically pulling something from his jacket pocket. He gave her question an easy shrug as he observed the tomb. There were dozens of red markings all over the cracked stone, messages, and wanton wishes waiting to be blessed. Dozens of flower brocades, beads, and cheap little treasures littered the step of the old grave. Kneeling in front of the candle lit queen's tomb, the young man dropped a little plastic rosary on a pile of beads and other trinkets.

Madeleine read the name of _**"Madam Marie Laveau"**_ and frowned again in confusion. "Well of course, when Papa died, I cried for a month. But I wouldn't … you know …?" She seemed at a loss of words for what she just saw.

George frowned in study of something scattered in front of the Voodoo Queen's tomb. "Throw a party?" He finished her thought as he picked up the scattered contents.

"Some people might have, papa wasn't, what some might have called … respectable. But I doubt that anyone went to those lengths to celebrate his passing." She watched George shake a handful of glistening fruit seeds in his hand.

"It's just how the people here say goodbye." The teenager said distractedly smelling what was in his hand.

"Doesn't make any sense to me …" The woman sighed looking out at the disappearing of the silhouettes in the lit distance.

"Here is a rule of thumb, my dear. Up is down, left is right, right is wrong, and if you shouldn't, then you should most definitely do."

A short and stalky man walked out of the shadows. He wore a weather worn grey suit vest. His pinstripe shirt was unbuttoned at the top, a blue tie hanging loose against his chest. With a stained handkerchief he wiped the nervous sweat off his balding head, before putting on his straw fedora. On his shoulder he was lugging a crowbar that was hooked into a lit lantern that creaked with every step and movement. He was a playboy once, rich and carefree. Now, the hard times were apparent on his face and in the aged clothing on his back that had been expertly mended to barely show the wear and tear of the last seven years.

"Golly …" Madeleine exclaimed quietly at Harold Levinson's advice. "You make it sound like we've fallen down the rabbit hole to Wonderland." She rubbed her arm uncomfortably, the effect of their surroundings starting to get to her again.

"It's New Orleans, darling, we're close enough." He smiled nervously.

Their eyes met and the ghost of a deep, indescribable, fondness was found in the way that one another's gaze had met. Seeing her still so fresh, so perfect, even after all these years of hardship. The man thought of his big sister's party during the London season, thirteen years ago. There was so much regret for having waited, having shown caution in loving such a sweet girl. He knew in the long run she had been saved by him keeping her at arms-length. He knew the girl, she wasn't a quitter, and she would've stuck with him all those rough nights in the last seven years. People didn't think much of Harold Levinson, but even he wouldn't have been able to live with himself for subjecting such a sweet and innocent English Rose to this kind of life he and his nephew have lived.

There were smiles of sorrow and regret within their gaze when the two looked away. Harold checked behind him, while the female in their small threesome looked down to George. The teenager was glaring as he sniffed the fruit seeds, shaking them in hand in some private musing like an animal in the wild smelling danger in the winter's breeze. He slowly tossed the seeds down and looked aground for certain tracks.

"What it is?" She asked worriedly.

"Orange pips … fresh." George said darkly, cleaning his hands on his denim pants tucked into old boots.

The overweight man slowly turned back to the teen, catching his eye with a look of anxiety. Both had hardness to their shared understanding of what it meant. Madeleine saw it and felt her tender belly go liquid. "What does that mean?" She asked worriedly. "What do orange pips have to do with anything?" she looked from the boy to the older man, a hitch in her polished accented voice. Harold opened his mouth, more alert than ever, but nothing came out. But when she turned to George, he wasn't looking at her.

"Let's get moving." Was all the youth said as he stood. As if it had been answer enough for her.

"Which way, then?" Harold's voice squeaked.

Both George and Madeleine suddenly exchanged a shocked look, then, turned annoyed glares at the man. "What do you mean, which way?" They both said in unison. The short man felt suddenly cornered in the dirty looks and synchronicity of his two partners.

"You expect me to know?" He asked in nervous outrage.

Both fair maiden and teenage kid exchanged dependent looks of anger. The woman placed her hands on her slender hips, while George let out an exasperated sigh. Removing his hat, he ran his hands through his shoulder length raven curls. The English debutante rounded on the man she loved.

"This is your family crypt we're going to! You mean to tell me you don't know where your grandparents are buried?!" She snapped at him.

"Well …" The schlubby man drew out. "No!" He fought back, taking offense to the dirty look George was giving him. His nephew had his arms crossed, as he rubbed a hand over his chin in annoyance.

"Listen, my grandfather was crazy!" He exclaimed. "The summer Cora got married; all Cora, Robert, his sister, and I did was dig trenches around the mansion. He made it clear that we had to hold Petersburg at all cost against Grant! The war had been over twenty years! He saw Yankee's in his sleep. He once shot the Census man because he had a Boston accent and blue cap! So, no, I don't know where he was buried. Why would I? The man, literally, terrified me!" He lectured in outraged desperation.

When he was done there was a long pause in the small company. Madeline's entire body drooped down, her hand palmed to her forehead in defeat. She looked up to the moon and walked away in exasperation. George dipped his head with a scoffed laugh and shook his head. He placed an enduring hand on Madeleine's back and rubbed it before walking forward.

"You actually were balancing the entire future survival of our family in this Depression on me?" Harold asked George.

For a moment there was a bit of shame. For once, someone had trusted responsibility to him. But had she been alive, his mother could've told them, he would always find a way to screwed it up. George just steadied the man so that he'd stand straight and still.

"Yeah, I've done plenty of stupid things in my life … that wouldn't be one of them." George grumbled walking behind the man, the crinkling of paper rustling in ear shot.

The overweight man twisted to see what his nephew was doing, but George only grabbed him by the shoulder and twisted him back forward. When Madeline joined him behind Harold, the youth was using the dangling lantern to read two pieces of paper. There was red quill ink in Martha Levinson's hand with jumbled letters and symbols that had black pen writing in Lady Grantham's hand underneath that translated everything. Switching papers, the youth looked at a map of the Saint Louis Graveyard. He was quietly reading to himself, trailing his hand from a circled area. Every once in a while Harold would turn, and Madeleine would quickly turn him back face forward as they both read the papers.

"That way …" George pointed to their left.

Finally being able to turn around the older man twisted and saw George and Madeleine began following the cracked stone walkway. He saw the boy pocketing a map and letter in his leather jacket. Feeling his uncle's stare, George smirked grudgingly as they trekked cautiously.

"You're lucky that I got Granny's translation for insurance, or we might be up a creek." He said adjusting his hat.

There was a long pause as Harold frowned. "That seems unkind …" He replied.

Madeleine looked outrage turning back to the man that she had come to this strange city to reunite with. "You said you didn't know where the crypt was." She pointed out. "You can't blame him for having a back-up plan. I rather wish I thought of that." She turned back to the frightening quiet of the eerie atmosphere. Not made better by the fact that their junior leader was now on edge for an unspoken danger lurking near.

"It's not that …" He replied.

"Then what's got your knickers in a twist." George spoke distractedly.

It seemed strange, the boy at this point was about as American as anyone from Texas and yet he still used British words. It was either a habit, or the example of the expression 'home is where your heart is' that couldn't be hidden by the rugged exterior.

"Look, I'm not a stickler for things, but calling your mother granny is just something I can't stand for. It's mostly, because, it makes me feel old when people call my sister old." He chuckled self-loathingly.

"Wha …" Madeleine turned in confusion.

George growled and spun on Harold in contention. "For the last time, I'm tellin'ya, Cora is my Grandmother, **not** my mother!" He pointed his finger at the man angrily. His snarl showed evidence that this was an argument that has been had many times before Madeleine had joined them.

Harold suddenly began to count on his hand. "So your mother is …" He trailed off.

"Mary …"

"Who died in child birth?"

"No that's Aunt Sybil. Dad was the one who died on the day I was born."

"Robert?"

"Matthew Crawley!"

"Are you sure?"

"Look, look at my face, do I look like someone who is unsure about this?"

"I'm just saying that It's very possible you're Sybil's kid, I mean she died the day she gave birth."

"Yeah, to Sybbie, her daughter …"

"How do you know? You don't remember."

"I'll do you one better, pal, mom was a week pregnant when it happened. I wasn't even born yet!"

"I'm just saying it sounds suspicious to me that mother and father die on the same day."

"No, Aunt Sybil died in child birth, dad died on the day I was born …"

"Yeah, that's what I just said."

"No … asshole …" George looked like he was about to have a headache. "They're two separate events that are nine months apart!" He growled.

"I mean you and Sybbie could be twins and your mom took a spare."

"While I wouldn't put anything past mom, why would she do that? Especially since Uncle Tom was right there!"

"Maybe your old man and your 'real' mother had a thing on the side. This Uncle Tom wasn't the father, so what the hell? And Mary needed a tax break …"

"That's not how our family works … or taxes in England!"

"I'm just saying …"

"Yeah and if you continue to, I'm gonna bust your head with that crowbar!" George threatened. "And for the record … You're the worst uncle in the world, pal." He shook his head and motioned everyone to push on.

Harold and Madeleine shared a quiet beat before he turned to the younger woman next to him. "I've been called worst." He admitted.

"What, you a mind reader now?!" George muttered as he checked the map.

The debutante smirked at the glare the man gave at the teenager's parting shot. She kissed his cheek and left him with an amused smile on her lips. Meanwhile, the ragged business man corded his eyebrows together and began trying to piece together a family tree he hadn't thought about in ages.

There was endlessness, like death itself, to the great maze of stone markers. It was a labyrinth of crumbling names of men, women, and children, some ready to go, some too soon, and some who didn't even see it coming. Hundreds of years of sorrow and grief were like a sheen of wet paint on the blackened stained grey and white stone. All of it wrapped up in the curtain of the dark silence of midnight around them. There was a feeling of suffocation, the blanketing of spirit and the will of life, the further you traveled through this stone purgatory.

All of it was catching up to Madeleine whose breath began to shake. It was like being lost in a forest, enclosed by the endless stone wilderness of death's midnight garden. As far as she could see was a monument, the blank eyes of a cracking face of a child angel haunting her steps. She didn't want to be here, she wanted to go home. But tears began to well, because it occurred to her in that moment, that she was here, because she had none to go too.

Her father and she had hitched their wagons to Martha Levinson, gone to America, to Newport and New York. That was how she met Harold in London, how she met George. Her father wanted a fortune for her, but she had wanted love. And she had searched for it through all the channels that Martha had opened for her, but she never found it. Her mind was always on Harold, on the picnic, club, and balls of that magical London Season. It was a standard that could never be lived up too. Sure, she had been married, more than once. There was something stylish and posh about having a beautiful English wife that was titled. But it was never a right fit for her, to be like a trophy on her professional athlete husband's mantle. Even when she went out to the clubs with Rose in New York, in the months that she lived in San Sochi with Rose's family and George, she found that the youthful exuberance of drinking, dancing and partying with her girlhood friend had lost its luster. She felt tired; tired of the glamour, the falseness of the schemes of others that used her. Now it wasn't love that she was looking for, or a fortune, it was just somewhere to call home.

Before her father died, he had asked Mrs. Levinson to look after Madeleine. And to her credit, the old woman did. Though she didn't expect kindness, there wasn't cruelty, even in the old woman's aloofness for her. The day George arrived in America; the two had been thrown together by Martha. There was something insulting about the insinuation that she was some child's playmate, a governess, a living dolly to be dressed and played with, even if he was a future Lord. But she came to feel ashamed of those sentiments quickly. Even though she begrudgingly kept him company before his trip out west, when the whole world fell, she was not turned away by the young master of San Sochi when she needed him over the years. George had taken the life debt the family owed Madeleine very seriously, as any child who was a fan of science fiction and fantasy would. When her life was on fire, the New York papers hounding her about her Yankee baseball player husband's affair with a Rockette, she found refuge with George, Rose, and Atticus. She had tried and failed over the years since to find everything her papa wanted for her. But, even after her many failed marriages, George Crawley, wherever he had been, still honored Mrs. Levinson's promise to her father.

When he cabled her from Fort Worth saying that he needed her help with something, offering a cut in something big, she didn't hesitate. But when she arrived in the French Quarter and walked into the Jazz dive, she had felt so emotional and overwhelmed. Sitting at a back table, conversing and laughing with the old owner were George. But she became speechless to see a familiar figure adding to the funny stories being told. She had cried when she saw Harold, even after all these years, she had remembered those feelings in her first season in London. He looked worse for wear, older, ragged, and sadder, but that divine spark was still in his eyes. She wanted to run into his arms and kiss him, beg him to take her away. Instead she played it off as being happy to see George when she came to the table. She had thought her life could never have been better in the few days they had been in this queer, but oddly charming and deep city. But now that they had come to the hard part of this treasure hunt they were on, she'd rather face every Times reporter and tabloid in New York than see one more child's tomb.

" _Ooh death  
Whooooah death  
Won't you spare me over 'til a another year?"_

Suddenly, there was a slamming clank on graves, a heavy foot sliding on weed cracked pavement. It was getting closer and closer to the party. Anxiety flared deep within the delicate girl's chest, and the smell of a fresh nervous sweat poured down Harold's large bald spot. From lead position, George held his hand up in a fist, signaling wordlessly for them to halt. The moment the teenager went for the Webley Revolver at his side, Madeleine held her breath. George immediately motioned with the point of weapon's barrel for them to cover the Lantern light. Quickly, Madeleine shucked her plaid jacket and draped it over it. The clanking of metal against grave grew louder and was accompanied by the deep bass singing of a man. There was something mournful and resign in the frog like deepness of a soulful voice keeping beat with the song by his metallic clank. The ghostly preamble changed keys so suddenly that the frightened woman immediately grabbed Harold's free hand with a caught breath.

" _Well I am death none can excel  
I'll open the door to heaven or hell_

 _I'll fix your feet so you can't walk  
I'll lock your jaw so you can't talk_

 _I'll close your eyes so you cant see  
Death I come to take the soul  
Leave the body and leave it cold!"_

He was nearly on top of them when George drew the click of his revolver, waiting till the pitch changed to cover the noise. From the shadows of the night a clank echoed next to the little group. Sliding back into Madeleine's chest, George aimed his weapon from behind the gravestone they were pressed against. A shovel head came into view smacking the edge of their tomb, before it swung the other way, clanking on the one across from them. Suddenly, a shadow struggled forward, dragging a lame foot. The figure stopped inches from the barrel of the weapon pointed at his temple. He turned his head, till the killing cylinder was right between his eyes. With a shaky hand, Harold uncovered the lantern and held it aloft. The slender rays of the light through the forest of stone made strange patterns on the man's face when it became visible.

He was a frail and brittle old black man with a leathery face that had seen the darkest of abysses and the sunniest of light. He seemed gaunt and skeletal, nothing but bones and skin for arms that once had the strength of an ox. His pooched gut pushed out his ragged denim overalls and stained white tank top. An eaten straw hats brim shadowed two cataract eyes that looked right into the gun barrel. The old grave digger sightlessly stared at the group in quiet. The blind gaze caused Harold to turn away with eyes shut to the uncomfortable sight, Madeleine soundlessly shrieked, burying her face in Harold's chest. But George remained poised, matching the look given to him.

There was something unspoken between the two, when, slowly, George lowered his weapon. The old grave digger nodded to himself, giving a grunt of approval to an action that he couldn't possibly see. George returned the nod. Feeling the young man worthy, the grave digger slowly lifted his shovel to eye level. Then, with a wobbly strength that should have left him, he pointed the shovel in a direction.

" _Ooh death  
Whooooah death  
Won't you spare me over 'til a another year?!"_

The old man began to sing anew with his deepest baritone. Then, striking his shovel down, he began to limp and drag away from the group. When Harold and Madeleine opened their eyes they found that George was tipping his hat brim in thanks to the grave digger as he passed, disappearing into the shadows of death's maze. Then, as fast as he was there, he was gone. His deep echoed voice lost in the whistle of the midnight breeze through old stone.

Neither of them knew, for sure, if he had truly ever been there to begin with.

They both turned to the teenager, hearing the click of his father and aunt's revolver hammer being pushed forward. They were expecting the same strange and frightened look on the young man's face. But, instead, George seemed unfazed by the encounter. He instead blew on the cylinder of his weapon and gave it a rolling spin of clicking as he checked its readiness. With a gunfighter's twirl, he holstered the revolver at his side. The boy had lived in and around New Orleans for a year. The encounter with the grave digger was, by far, the least strange thing that he had come across in this city, much less his journeys, so far in a life of peculiar adventures. Someday he could tell them about the half a dozen encounters he's had in his life with a young, beautiful Edwardian Lady with matching raven hair and dark blue eyes that he only half remembers when she goes. He turned to his companions and motioned his head for them to push on. Both Madeleine and Harold exchanged worried and confused looks, but found no choice but to follow.

The structure that the old blind man had pointed them too was an ivy covered crypt that smelled of mildew and mold. Vines wrapped, the beyond rusted, Iron Gate and the twin stone angel statues that flanked the entrance, long defaced over the long years of neglect. After nearly forty years of standing forgotten by the world if not the universe itself, the grand crypt of one of the greatest Southern families in America, which would never be remembered by history, had once again been found by the last of their descendants. While George conferred with his map with Harold holding the light, Madeleine moved toward the mouth of the black abyss below. She felt anxiety well deep in her lower belly as she saw that beyond the gate was a long staircase that led downward into the darkness. Her eyes pierced through the veil, trying to see what was at the bottom.

Suddenly the wind picked up, fluttering her silky blouse, obscuring her beret. Adjusting her clothing, she turned back again, and for a second she saw the outline of a figure at the foot. It had a bull's head. She let out a gasp and fell over. Her hand covered her mouth when she saw George quickly stride in front of her, Harold quickly swooping on her with a helpful hand.

"Where is _he_?!" George asked in a rush of aggression.

She used Harold's grip to find her feet and rushed up behind George, using him as a shield as she peeked over his shoulder. But whatever was down there, or what she thought was down there, was gone. It looked as empty as it had been when they arrived. She let out a strong sigh that tickled George's curls poking out from under the back of his hat.

"It's nothing … I just thought I saw something, is all." She placed a hand on her stomach. She turned to find that her elder companion was smirking nervously at her in understanding. She returned it to him with a heavy breath.

"Come on, we're here!" George said forcefully, stress showing on his handsome young face.

She noticed that his hand was still frozen under jacket. His grip was hard on the revolver handle on his back hip. She saw in the anxiety and adrenaline in his blue eyes that they were in much more dangerous circumstances than her two companions had led her to believe. She never got a chance to question him, because, he strode to the gate. They had found 'X' on their map, and now it was time to dig. It was obvious that he didn't want to be caught mid-discovery by some adversary that they were now in competition against that she wasn't told about. Her mind somehow wandered back, at that moment, to the discovery of the orange pips earlier.

The teenager snatched the rickety lantern from his uncle's grip and drew open the iron gate. It gave an eerie banshee's screech that waved out into the late night, causing everyone to cringe. Then, they only heard the clapping of worn boots on stone steps, as the light lit the way down. But it was just somewhere that her feet couldn't allow her to follow.

"Hey, don't worry about it at all." Harold came up to Madeleine. "You and me, I don't think anything in our lives ever prepared us for robbing the tombs of our forefathers, huh?" He gave a nervous chuckle, placing a comforting arm around her.

The younger woman looked grateful in his embrace, but doubtful in his words. "Really …?" She looked down to her feet. "Because, I'd say, papa would've taught me how to use a shovel if he knew Grandmamma had been buried with priceless jewels." She looked up into Harold's eyes, waiting for him to see her for the way so many others in London society had always. But the balding man only smiled.

"What do you think George and I are doing … but if that's the case, then, it's a good thing we brought an expert." He patted her shoulder, causing her to take a smile down into the depths of the ancient crypt they both descended, hand in hand.

It was a long and dark journey that seemed to go on for hours, though it was much shorter than that. The glow of lantern light and the sound of feet scuffing on stone preceded them down into the main chamber. From the fifth step down they were met with an unnatural cold breeze that blew in and out like their party had entered the lair of a mythical beast. For a moment, George Crawley was small again, following Anna down into the basements of Downton. And despite the frightening and unfamiliar surroundings, it brought a smirk of nostalgia to his face.

Together they paused as a group when they reached the foot of the stone staircase. The one and only chamber of the crypt was in a 'U' shape. It was strange mixtures of stone tablets hammered into slots were husbands, wives, stillborn babies, and grown children died in the early 1700's to 1800's. But somewhere in the mid-1800's began yellowed and brittle glass, which ancient urns were placed behind, surrounded by important keepsakes from their lives. There was a formation of tin soldiers around Martha Levinson's uncle's remains. He was a boy who drowned at age ten when he jumped off a rope swing and hit his head on a river rock. There was a collection of ratty porcelain dollies around an Aunt that neither Cora nor Harold ever met, felled by Scarlet Fever in the second year of the War of Secession. But the strange aberration from the rest of the chamber was that in the dead center. It was a marble tomb that had roman columns like a poster of the rectangular stone bed. It wasn't the oldest grave in the room, but there was something special about it.

"There she is …" Harold proclaimed with a voice stricken.

It wasn't the first time he had been in this room. But after a Depression, after his mother's death, and the destruction of everything he had ever known and believed in, everything in this room had a new meaning. He knew that what they were doing was for the survival of the continuation of all the names that these people had a hand in creating. But there was something shameful, even inside the crooked business man, for taking something so sacred … even if it technically did belong to Cora, George, and himself now.

George nodded, checking Lady Cora's handwriting. "Yep, there she blows …" He handed Madeleine the lantern. Together, with his Granny's letter, Madeleine with the light, and Harold ready with the crowbar, they advanced on the tomb.

But suddenly, George paused, as if an alarm went off in his head. He placed a bracing hand on Madeleine's belly. He turned slowly to the only entrance and exit. There was a secondary iron gate, which was just less rusted than the one that was exposed to the elements. One of the doors was open and the other was hanging by the bare fingernails of an eroded hinge. On the ground, in front of it, was an old lock that had been knocked off the door. His eyes flicked around in a flash of danger.

"Someone's already been here …" He said gravely.

As if on cue there was a flicker of scratching noises. Flames burst forth from the areas closest to the stairs. Figures with lit torches stepped forward, forming a crescent formation that blocked the companions from their only way out. They were of every size and their features masked by pointed white hoods. Their matching white robes tied with roughspun ropes looked worn and stained from the humiliation of the last time they had been donned. There were five Klu Klux Klan members in the small group, they were armed with hammers, picks, axes, and one had a bull whip in hand. The large man, who wielded the whip, gave it a crack in Madeleine's direction tauntingly, his eyes through its slits showed relish in the sound of her little kitten like yelp.

"How yawl doin tonight?" The lead Klan member asked with a mocking chuckle to his deep southern accent.

George remained stone faced, holding his ground while the rest of his company backed away. He looked from man to man before he shifted, placing his hands on his hips.

"Fella's …" he greeted laconically flat.

The sudden appearance of the intimidating figures in their inhuman costumes and ghostly intimidation caused Harold Levinson to grab what he cared for most and flee. "Run Madeleine!" Harold grabbed her hand and ran the other way. His panic to avoid conflict was so great; he had forgotten there was nowhere to go. He ran right into his grandfather's headstone and hit the floor in a heap.

"Harold!" Madeleine dropped to her knees and cradled the suddenly unconscious man. George winced, pressing thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose with a groan at the sudden waterfall of mockery in the laughter that followed.

One of the Klansman pointed a hammer at the man in the beauty's arms. "Looks like the Kike can't hold his water, huh?" He sounded young, loud, and obnoxious. He was just the kind of asshole that George would start with.

The teenager turned to the woman who was frightened out of her mind. "Get up, will ya, you're embarrassing us!" There was just a hint of a cold tone that had the eerie arrogant sounds of Lady Mary under stress. Despite shaky legs, the girl grabbed onto the fallen crowbar and held it out, ready to defend herself. The boy gave a confident grunt at the ray of weapons brandished against him.

"How goes it, Wash?" George asked casually to the leader of the Klan members.

The hooded vandal's expression was covered, but the surprise could be felt by the visible step away. Elijah Buford Washburn, 'Wash' to his friends, had been a fugitive from Federal Agents for nearly three years and was uneasy to hear his real name being spoken. He looked hard in the dark and like a flash of lightning, he recognized the eyes staring, unflinchingly, back. An attack of adrenaline burned through him as a deep ache stiffened his neck where the marking from a hot iron brand lay permanently on his skin. It had been meant for some little Gypsy slut. They were gonna put her brand right on her bare chest, were her cleavage would be when she grew up. That way, every time she revealed her tempting body, all the good, clean, virtuous folk, would know what that dirty whore was. But Washburn would never forget the eyes of the little bastard when he jumped out of nowhere. The kid had twisted the branding iron out of his hand and back handed him with it. But it was the pain he remembered the most when the little son of a bitch jammed the hot iron right onto the base of Wash's neck.

This punk kid wasn't just one of the Runaways …

"Well, well, well, look what we got here, boys. It's Buck Rogers himself." His mocking accented voice was dripping with a deep, black, hatred. "The hero of Amantha Manor, all grown up, and come to finish the job, ain't he?" He tilted his covered head, snarling as he looked the handsome youth to measure him up.

"He ain't that big, Pa …" The youngest pointed with his hammer in taunting. "He still ain't that big!" He whooped in excitement for a good fight with people viewed as righteous to be killed, a real choir boy.

"Where is he …" George asked darkly. "You're an ignorant shit bird, Washburn, but you're not stupid enough to set foot in this town again, unless you're following him." The teenager spit out his venom. "So where is your boss, the _good preacher_?" He asked. When he was met with silence he continued. "I know he got away when the Feds stormed Amantha … So where is he?!" There was a vengeful anger that wasn't hidden in the teen's voice. "This is your last chance, fess up or die." George's face was implacably cold.

There was a long silence that followed the frigid threat. There were certain people, certain men, who made threats and said things when backed into the corner. Sometimes it was to save face, other times it was to impress someone, or even themselves, into thinking they weren't complete cowards in the "No-Win" situation they were in. Many of the Klu Klux Klan members had come into their trap ready to believe the same of George Crawley. But one glance into his grandmother and aunt's shared eyes told a different story. The teenager wasn't afraid, wasn't putting on an act. As he stood alone, one against five, face to the very face of intolerance and hatred of the Reconstruction Age, he truly believed every word he spoke. They would tell him what he wanted to know, or he'd kill every one of them where they stood.

There was a hitched breath of uneasiness from the men in white hoods, before a forced mockery of laughter fell over the solitary, defiant, figure. Unlike so many times before during their private war, they were sure they really had a twist on their old enemy this time. "It don't even matter, Rogers … ain't gonna concern you in a minute." The leader made a cracking noise with the whip. He looked behind George at Madeleine who was breathing hard, armed with the crowbar. "Too bad you set your pet monkeys loose into the wilds, Kid. The Niggers give better sport then Kikes and Anglo Belle's." He stepped forward, folding his whip and tapping it on his palm. "Alright, boys, I get her first …!" He announced.

CRACK!

CRACK!

CRACK!

CRACK!

CRACK!

Madeleine screamed, putting her hands over her ears as the echoing of gunshots in the crypt bounced off the walls making it as loud as the roar of cannon. The hooded man, froze, his whip still above his head. George stood in front of him, Matthew Crawley's revolver smoking in his son's hand. Behind Washburn, the sound of bodies hit the floor with cascading thumbs and the clatter of tools and torches. Pools of blood stained the dirty white robes of the now dead Klan members. The man whirled around, his wide dark eyes surveying the last of the men who had once belonged to the oldest chapter of the Klan in the country. He looked at the corpse of his boy lying there, and felt the world tilt. His strength left him all of the sudden as he dropped to his knees. His hand was sticky and hot as he looked down to see the cradled gunshot wound that had flared right into his gut. He didn't feel pain, just felt so … tired. When he hit the ground, his shocked eyes looked on his fallen brothers, whose twitches were getting few and far between as the moments went by. Focusing on them he felt a pit of disgust well deep in his soul. Everything he ever believed in, the very flower he was protecting, it was all gone now. All of it, their sacred heritage, their culture, and his very life had been taken from him … by children.

In his death throws he looked up to the sight of the boy watching him. "Should've remember the goddamn 'Ray Gun', shouldn't I?" He admitted in with a croaked defeat.

"Should'a, could'a, didn't …" George gave his weapon a spin before finishing coldly.

The sleek and futuristic looking revolver that was given to British Officers during 'The Great War' had never been seen by the youth of America. So it was, when George's group of friends and fellow Runaways first laid eyes on his father and Aunt Sybil's Webley MK IV, it had been Charlie "Lead Belly" Stedman who proclaimed that it looked like something out of Buck Rogers.

The name stuck ever since.

The crypts were getting darker as he watched Matthew Crawley's weapon still trained on him. He tried to spit blood on the young man's scuffed boots, but only came out in a pathetic string that hung off his lips, blocked by white cloth of his mask. It was torment to the prideful man to spend his last moments like this.

"You got one shot left, you gonna do me right, boy?" He coughed. His voice nasally, clogged with blood. He motioned his head to the revolver. "What's the matter, Nigga lover, ain't you got the stomach for it?!" He mocked the teenager.

George slowly leaned over so that he came eye to eye with the slits in the mask. "It's not for you." He said darkly. There was a flood of desperation, hatred, and outrage when the youth holstered his gun and turned his back, leaving him to die on some shitty floor to be forgotten. But he took it all in stride as the final words spoken to him bounced around in a dying mind.

He let out a hooted laugh as more blood came out of his mouth. "You … you can't kill him. No one can … can kill him, kill Satan's own begotten son!" His face relaxed in amused mockery at the expense of the teenager and stayed that way forever.

The ominous last words hung in the silence that filled the crypt. Blood, emptied bowels, and dust, death's aroma clung to the stale air of the crypt. George had his eyes closed, there was just a hint of brooding regret of what he had done. But it was in combat of relief and an almost overpowering feeling of justice for all the innocent people murdered, all the supposed criminals and sinners killed by these men. He remembered the unclaimed coffins of brave children being lowered into unmarked graves, while what remained of their young friends sung "Loch Lomond" through tears and salutes. Seeing the last of the men who contributed to so much suffering and death, finally get there's brought a worrisome relief to the young man he knew was wrong. It was a conflict that someone so young shouldn't know, but one that seldom picked its haunts based on what was fair in life.

"You … you murdered them." Madeleine's soft and demure dark green eyes were wide as she looked on the sight of the fallen Klansmen, the flames of their torches fizzling against the dark blood pooling underneath. She slowly stared at the teenager who had done it. There was no mistaken that any sort of idea that this woman had of the young and spirited lad that she had met at the New York's docks so many years ago, was shattered.

Something died inside the handsome youth when he saw the new way the woman was staring at him. But he let his heart harden in the shock of his old world at what had happened in this new one in the eight years he had been gone. He glared at her, the softness and conflicted introverted. There was nothing but uncompromising determination as he passed her.

"Men get murdered ... Klansmen get put down." He corrected her with a growl in his voice. He held his hand out for her to give him the crowbar.

Madeleine looked on the corpses and then turned to George with a haunted look. "What … what was he talking about? Satan's son can't be killed? What … what does that mean?" She asked.

The teenager took the crowbar from her hand. "Not right now … We need to get what we came for, and get out of here." He motioned her to get the lantern.

"But Harold ... we should."

"He can wait!"

"George! Please, I don't understand …"

"Madeleine!" George braced her shoulders. "Look at me." He said. "Their boss is looking for the same thing we are, he has for seven years. That is how this whole thing started. He murdered Granny Levinson for the treasure … and tortured her maids and footmen for days … weeks, for any sort of scrap of knowledge for where she hid it. They didn't stake this place out, just to get us. They waited, because, they don't know where to look … we do." The youth shook her to refocus her concentration. "This …" he pointed to the dead men. "This is just the beginning of what he'll throw at us to get the _necklace_. Now come on!" He dragged her over to the stone slab.

The tomb at the center of murder, torture, and guerrilla war between 'The Runaways', Cultist Preacher, and his Klan minions, sat undisturbed for many years. The last time that someone had shown interest in this special woman's resting place was Robert Crawley, then the Viscount of Downton Abbey. As they lay to rest Cora and Harold's grandfather, he had blown the dust off the tomb and was intrigued by the African scroll work that replaced a name and date of the one who rested there. When he asked his then fiancé about it, Martha glared and offered to show young Master Robert what was inside. He dropped it immediately under an apologetic look from the young beauty hugging his arm. Now, some forty years later, their only grandson blew dust off the mysterious carvings in the same manner. The same dark blue eyes of Cora trailing over it, matching it to the now mature woman's hand writing in a letter their daughter had given her nephew.

"Who is it?" Madeleine asked.

George just shook his head in distraction. "Worry about that later …" He folded Cora's translated letter back into his jacket pocket. Madeleine stood back when the youth took ahold of the crowbar and pressed leverage. Holding the lantern aloft, the woman turned back to check on Harold who was still motionless on the floor. But she snapped to when the young man began to pry the seal, the sound of stone grinding on stone rolling in echo in the cavernous crypt. Madeleine stepped forward, shining more light on the work. Ancient dust particles and granulated stone danced in clouded chaos in the yellow lantern light. Suddenly, a hand shot out from the opening inside the tomb and pushed over the stone steal. There was a loud and vicious screeching animal noise that was directed right in George and Madeleine's faces. Sitting up like a shot from inside the tomb was a terrifying shadow that caused the delicate woman to faint in fear and surprise.

It was a big, broad shouldered, figure. He wore a long black priest's ceremonial robes of worn and tattered silk. On his chest was an ordinate voodoo necklace of gold of a jet scorpion with ruby red eyes that looked right through the person who stared too long. The creature's right hand was sun kissed, big, and could be mistaken to have been made of granite, peaked with a few wispy hairs on the knuckles. But for the left hand, there was none to speak of. From out of the floppy sleeve was a rusting iron prosthetic, twisted and mutilated by a second hand blacksmith's inexperience. The tormenting piece of metal had two blackened pincers and a hooked claw at the bottom to grip things. It brought nothing but horrible pain to this featureless creature. Fore there was nothing more frightening or perverse then sight of this dark specter whose face haunted many of nightmare by the mere cover of a black angus bull's head he wore as a cowl.

From the dead bull's open maw a wheezed breath escaped the high pitched wail it screeched. A cloud of golden dust shot forth like a germinated cough of a diseased man. It caught the young raven haired teenager right in the face causing him to gag. George retreated, coughing, blinded, and panicked in surprise. It was like all of his senses had shut down. Wobbling away, George tripped on a column and hit the stone floor with a loud thud, wheezing and rubbing his eyes. Meanwhile, the large, looming figure slowly stood from inside the desecrated tomb. There was something important, almost sacred, about the way the bull headed figure moved. Like a priest that was constantly leading a holy procession to alter for midnight mass, incense preceding his unquestionable holiness. As he walked, the low angle of the lantern light casted his shadow upon the graves. It was a larger than life, black, horned creature's silhouette passing over the dead.

George scrubbed his eyes furiously. The sight he regained was twisting and nonsensical. The columns were inverted and every time he tried to get up, the hilled ground twisted landing him back on the floor. His lungs felt like they had inhaled sparks and embers from a fire, and his heart was thumping hard as if he was in a sprint at full speed. He hacked as he got to his knees, holding himself up with one hand. Squinting, he looked over to the familiar figure who stooped down over the beautiful, fallen, Madeleine, who lay unconscious.

His only hand reached down and grabbed the front of the titled woman's silken blouse. With one effortless motion, he lifted her into the air, scooping her with his amputated arm. She laid, arched back, in his arms. The sightless eyes of the bull raked over her lovely face, free hand massaging her chocolate locks. Shifting her over to hold her aloft with his only hand, the animal's eyes stared deeply and unblinkingly at the unconscious woman. Slowly, with fascination, he ran the cold and rusted talons of his prosthetic over her milky cheek in a stroking motion. The fair damsel moaned in sensitive discomfort of the cold metal petting her sensually.

"I don't know you …" The man's voice was hollow with a deep, oaken, timber. It carried through the cavern in perfect, measured, pitch. There was no emotion, no pleasure, pain, or feeling in the baritone voice.

"Aghah!" Madeleine groaned in pain, her soft cry caught in her throat as a thin beaded line of blood trailed down her cheek.

George grunted in protest. "Game for a rematch, or would you'd rather pet the pussy?!" He challenged over to the figure, even with a world he still could not get in bull headed preacher halted his subjection of the arched English beauty hooked in his arm. Removing his talons from the girl's cheek, he stood a little taller.

"You, however …"

He spoke only to his own narrative in the stream of consciousness. His voice sounded as if someone had reminded him of all the pain and humiliation of the hardest days of his life. It might have been three years, voice deeper, taller, features and physic more grown, but he still knew the kid just by his voice. He dropped Madeleine with an unceremonious thump on the hard stone floor. The shock, the knock on the head, had awoken her with a gasp. Her eyes were wide in fearful shock, hands rubbing her head as salty tears painfully mixed with bloody scratch.

His paces were slow and careful, while George struggled and failed to get up to meet him. When he collapsed again, his sight was filled with Madeleine lying on the floor. Her eyes were frightened when their gaze met from across the small space. It was as if she was watching a hungry lion slowly stalk a wounded animal on the Serengeti. But he was distracted when he saw a scorpion slowly crawling up her leg. He wanted to call out to her, but his voice was caught in his throat when a larger, hairy, black scorpion made its way up from her cleavage, crawling up her porcelain skin toward her wound. Yet the girl didn't react, as if she didn't see it, didn't feel it.

"Run … Madeleine, Ru …!"

A calloused hand that had a grip of iron grabbed George by the front of his jacket and hoisted him off his feet. There was no emotion on the face of the open mouthed bull that looked right at him. But the sentiment of the two's relationship was felt when the preacher's iron claws swatted the boy's fedora from his head, freeing black curls. The stationary eyes of this dark creature of the abyss bore into George's as, not for the first time, the two enemies came face to face.

"You …" The figure bore deep into the young man he hated so much. "Captain Buck Rogers and his crew of Runaways … George Robert Crawley, Viscount of Downton Abbey, heir to the Earl of Grantham …" He continued giving his enemy a shake. "Oh yes …" He drew out the word as he nodded. "I'd never forget you." He whispered with the very brimstone of hell at his wits.

It would be hard not to remember the young man that had left his mark in each confrontation. In their first fight, he had easily handled a twelve year old who fought with rage rather than discipline. There had been barely a fight to be had. He had tossed the boy around like a rag doll. But he never saw the rusted nail he picked out of the floor board. Grabbing the bloodied and beaten boy off the ground, he tried to throttle him, when George jammed the nail right through the bull's head and into his eye. Screaming and howling in pain and rage, he watched the boy escape taking with him the nubile virgin girl that the preacher had bought from her whore mother and the madam who sold them.

The next time they had fought, it was through the ancestral home of Martha Levinson, Amantha Mansion. A year of guerilla warfare and fighting experience informed the now thirteen year old boy who matched up against the preacher. He was quicker, better trained, and his punches were stronger than the first time. The bull headed figure had no choice but to rely on his imposing strength and size to push back the young fighter. The duel between the two figure heads of their private little war had continued even as the FBI had come to the rescue of the children that had long opposed him. He had the boy where he wanted him, backed into the corner, when George sprang forth with a Great-Great-Grandfather's Confederate officer's saber. With one angry slash, he completely severed the Preacher's hand at the forearm, pivoting, he jabbed him in the spleen. Wounded and hobbled, he still recalled the eyes of the boy who held the bloody saber in threat. With the sound of federal agents storming up the stairs and the specter of death in the inches the fencer made toward him, he turned and jumped out the window.

He'd leave his purpose and quest behind to live in the shadows. The pain of his mutilated eye in the winter and the endless torment of the weight of unrefined metal on his arm was always a reminder of his ill-fated battles with George Crawley over a treasure beyond this boy's feeble understanding of birthrights and family ownership.

It had been his destiny to fulfill the visions that the ancients had spoken of. He was nothing but a young bus boy, raised in a Baptist orphanage, but he still remembered the unstoppable power of the darkness that chose him. They had lured him away from his station with the smell. It had been a beautiful, heady rush in an aroma that bore an unbridled appetite deep within ones corruptible soul. He followed it, a smell, a feeling that no one else had or noticed but him. Through the crowds, the brass bands playing on the street corners, and down into the forgotten dark alleys where the slit eyes of stray black cats watched. And within those untreaded places he found the old man. He wore a straw hat, his ashy dark skin glimmering in candle light. There were long tussles of fuzzy white hair trailing down his bare back. He sat in front of an altar of worship, filled with heathen idols and golden treasure. And all of them offered to a great carving of a black scorpion on the wall, its eyes of ruby. Long had he stared into them, till he lost himself, lost all sight of this earthly plain. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, naked. The old man chanted and worshiped, squeezing the blood of a snake in a gilded cup. On top of the young boy was a dark skinned island beauty, slim, big frizzy hair, and naked. The older woman's dusky skin had strange and ancient symbols pained in blood as she made love to the boy. And in the chanting, virginal pleasure, smoky incense, and strange symbols on her body, the darkness of their evil religion showed him a vision. The scorpion, through the euphoria as a catalyst, bestowed on him a vision of a great and sacred treasure from its ancient land. To gain it, would bring him such impossible power.

But within it was a warning, a flash of visions he didn't know. There, in the snow of a foreign land, was a grand stately manor house that stood stalwart against the twilight. Inside was a young and beautiful woman with blue eyes and black tresses of curls and a ribbon that tied it, smiling at herself in her vanity mirror. And finally was another young woman, statuesque, regal, with red tinted eyes sitting in a hospital bed holding an infant in her arms. She was sharing a smile with a blond man with crystal eyes as they admired and loved the newborn in their arms.

The preacher had spent all of his life, since that night, haunted by his desire for this power and the warnings of this coming stopgap to the fulfillment of his lusts. He had found that couple's wedding picture at Amantha, it drove him to a rage in Martha Levinson's final moments. He demanded to know their names. He needed to know who they were. But she died smiling a bloody, pained, contrarian smile. He kept the old photograph for years, agonizing and praying hatefully against their love that had created some unknown obstacle to him. But it wasn't till that night, when he lost his arm, which he understood. He spent so much time waiting for the regal princess and her knight in shining armor to step foot in his city and obscure his quest. It only occurred to him at the sight of the gallant figure, holding the saber that night. It was what their love had born into this world that created a converging path that led to this very moment.

The preacher dropped the teenager to the ground with a thud. "You have eluded fate, you have eluded destiny, you have eluded me …" He picked up the crowbar with a scrape and turned on George Crawley. "You have eluded _The_ _Darkness,_ boy, for the final time." He was measured as if he was giving a spoken prayer of blessing at a baptism. The house was Downton Abbey, the girl in the mirror remained a mystery, but the couple did not. They were Mary and Matthew Crawley, and their love, their intertwined souls, and their son had left their curse upon him for the last time.

George wheezed and coughed, his vision tinted in gold and red. All around him shadows moved and slithered across the twisting and hilly floor. Hundreds of voices echoed into the darkness, men, woman, children, all of them pleading to be let go, to be freed. Their fists were pounding against stone plaques desperately. The young man was sober enough to know that he had been hit with some sort of hallucinogenic powder, but it all still seemed so real. The floor moved as large, black, scorpions poured out of every crack in the stone wall, skittering closer to him.

He had just enough control to blindly draw his gun. Vainly, slowly, too slow, did he point to fire, when it was knocked out of his hand. It skidded across the floor, passing through the scorpions that filled every nook of the crypt. Suddenly, he felt a throbbing pain bluntly shoot up his ribs when something hard, cold, and metal smashed into his side. He grunted while covering his head as scorpions crawled over him. With another hard blow, the metal of the crowbar rang off his elbow bone, cushioned somewhat by his leather jacket. He could hear the skittering sound of bugs all over him, as a backhanded swing clubbed George in the hip. With one hand, the bull headed creature beat the teenager with forehand and backhand, forehand and backhand. He let the pain of his eye and the weighted agony of his metal prosthetic dictate the savage rage that guided the beating. The only pleasure derived was the memory of the worried nights staring at the elated faces of Matthew and Mary Crawley on their wedding day, knowing that he was finally terminating the very threat to his purpose, and the seed of their love, forever.

"Leave him alone!"

Suddenly Madeleine flew at the beastly sacrilegious mockery. She leapt on his back, her fists flailing on the back of the preacher's head. It wasn't that there was a great bravery in the woman's heart. But no matter how much her image of the boy had changed, Madeleine, had been a woman who had lived a life in the mockery of others. All because her beloved and respected mama died when she was a girl and her grandpapa blamed her father for it. She had not known much kindness in her life, beyond Lady Rose who thought her interesting when others were suspicious. But since his arrival in America, George had been nothing but kind to her, taking her in when she needed help. He made her family when others had written her off. For that she could never turn her back on him, even in the darkest moments of her life.

She attached to the man like a monkey to the branch, riding his back while he twisted and turned to get her off. Finally, temper was touched in the interruption of his vengeance. He gave an angry and aggressive spin. The force was greater than her grip could hold and she spun off his shoulders. With a loud crunch, she landed back first against the bottom of one of the tomb's columns. Dirt and sediment fell as the column began to sink forward, halted for only the moment. Madeleine twisted and gasped in pain as she writhed on the floor.

"Harold …" She pleaded breathlessly for help. But the man was still unconscious.

George turned and saw the beast move toward a helpless Madeleine who was shaking her head in preemptive call for mercy as the large figure began to obscure. He tried to crawl toward her, but all he felt was the feet of scorpions cover him. The sensation caused a great anxiety of sensitivity in his senses and mind. The preacher grabbed the woman by the front of her blouse and ripped it open. She called out for George to help her, but he couldn't. The harder he struggled the more he lost himself to the side effects of the poison in his veins. He watched through gritted teeth as the beast tied Madeleine's arms to the posts of the tomb. She kept turning to George for help as she stood limply, exposed to the frigid crypt air. She screamed in tears when the preacher ripped away the rest of her blouse to expose the smooth skin of her naked upper body to the night.

"You have chosen a great sin, girl, and now, a pound of flesh shall be your salvation." He announced with a haunting timber. He picked up the fallen bullwhip left behind by the dead Klansman and gave it a loud crack in test.

"Please … don't, don't … NO! … AHH!

A bloody streak of crimson lashed over her supple bare back on the first strike. She cried for help, for mercy, turning to look at George, wondering in her pain and fear why he was just lying there face down. That was until the next lash caused her to scream again jerking against her restraints. The desperation for action pushed the boy further down the rabbit hole, losing his senses to the movement looming over him. It was a girl in a silvery evening gown and matching silk gloves. Her long golden locks were soft and perfect. Fresh and beautiful, she looked like the most picturesque water painting of a princess from Arthurian Legend. Her green eyes were lost in a soul deep sorrow as she looked down at George.

"Marigold … Marigold help her, Goddamn it, Marigold help Madeleine!" He croaked at the teenage beauty that stood despondently over him. But the girl only looked tearfully away, before she began to pace to the exit. He felt his heart break all over again. His whole soul sink in despair to see the one person he always had, when he had no one else, leave him.

"I love you, George, always remember that." Her voice echoed through the cavern as she began to disappear into the darkness.

He reached out a hand. "No, Marigold, don't … come back, don't leave!" he called but halted his voice. Fore as she moved to an exit, she passed a solitary figure that stood near the tomb.

It was a pale skinned woman with red tinted eyes. Glistening, shining, and shimmering like a precious jewel. She was an elegant and glamorous contrast to the surroundings in sleek, satiny sequence. In her familiar black mermaid dress and diamond choker, earrings, and bracelet, she was perfection. Lady Mary was every inch the perfectly beautiful model from a night that happened long ago in George's memory. But her face was implacably hard, emotionless, but for a soul cringing venomous glare that she aimed at George. He had not been fast enough, not fast enough to save her daughter like he promised he would. He felt his whole soul, everything that made him, him, shrink to nothing in her glare. The hatred in her stole the life out of him, even after all these years. Even when Madeleine screamed, the crack of the whip like a gunshot, she did not flinch, did not take away the poisonous hate in her eyes for her, now, only child.

"Mom … mama … I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He sounded like a small boy again, begging her once last time to forgive him for his failure on that Christmas morning. But when she did not break her cold demure, he felt defeated, the life drain away as he flinched at the arachnids that swarmed over him.

" _The way I-, heard it, he came in to the bedroom and she was … talking to it!"_

" _Hahaha … no, she wasn't."_

" _Yes, there he was standing with nothing to cover himself but his hair, and she was in bed, talking to it. "Well, Little Lady Mary, what a wonderful day wasn't it?" And he just stared at her horrified. Here he is marrying this beautiful, rich, heiress, and he comes in there to squirt inside her, and she's talking to a dolly!"_

 _ **HAHAHA!**_

" _Ugh, that's why I hated her. It was so uncomfortable to be around her, especially with that "wittle gwirl boice." Just shoot me now."_

" _No refinement and always found joy in the most childish things. She used to even eat with her mouth open … remember?"_

" _Worse, she converse with the food in her mouth. If anyone was gonna marry that incepted, immature, brat, it was gonna be some Anglo, milk baby, who only washed his balls twice a week."_

 _ **HAHAHA!**_

" _Oh Cordelia, you're so awful."_

" _No, what was awful was that you know what? He still consummated the marriage after all that."_

" _Ewww … do you think her dolls watched?"_

 _ **HAHAHA!**_

" _Better, no, no, better yet … they named their daughter after the doll!"_

 _ **HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!**_

" _Oh, poor thing, no wonder she married her cousin … And he killed himself!"_

 _ **HAHAHAHAHA!**_

It had been four years, but he still knew the voices. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his blood ran cold. On top and around the tomb were four dead bodies in familiar positions. The Klansmen were a distant memory, as these corpses were very familiar to the young man. They had haunted him most nights, when the world was still and quiet. They were the bloated and fresh bodies of the people he killed, the very first. The old Knickerbockers were still undressed in an assortment of different ways. Some still had their bloomers and corsets, others were topless down to underskirt, and one was completely naked, her flabby, loose, and wrinkly skin on full display. They all still had their fatal wounds from the weapon used to murder them. Van Houten still had a bullet hole in her neck, Cordelia, a hole in her chest, headshots in the others. He watched them in disbelief as they conversed, slowly rising up. Their arrogant superiority never left their cold dead bodies as they laughed and mocked again like cackling crows. They got up as if nothing had ever happened, still filled with old grudges that fueled the psychosis and hatred of times and places long passed. To the Gilded Age, when they had been bested in the drawing and ballrooms of New Port and New York by heiresses like young Cora Levinson.

To see them alive and walking filled George with a frigid hatred and an unburdening relief. For a moment, his ultimate sin, the one that had plagued and followed him since New York, was taken off his heart. These women deserved what they had gotten, but it should never have been the responsibility of a twelve year old boy to deal out that kind of justice. There were other ways to stop them, to wait till they had finished with Rose, before doing something reasonable and rational. Something his father would've done. He would've had the instinct and cleverness to come up with something, rather than to kick open the door and become the soulless vigilante wielding this man, this hero's gun, like an avenging gunfighter.

But a great and horrible pain of despair fell over him. The relief of his moment of reprieve from the guilt of the murder's hand became another type of guilt. One in which he regretted not doing a better job. Slowly, the old women began to converge on Lady Mary who stood unmoving, frozen in her hatred for George. Like desert buzzards salivating at the fresh meat, they circled her, before they pecked. They kissed her lips, nuzzled and tasted her long pallid neck, hand roaming over the expensive silken sequence covering her taut figure. They commented on how yummy she looked and tasted, taking turns kissing her. Slowly, perversely, they began to work her out of her dress. But the younger woman didn't react, didn't respond. She submitted and accommodated as her stare lay unblinking and unbroken from her son. The rage and disappointment was so great that she'd allow herself to be taken by the old crows, picked apart, if only to torture her greatest mistake with the sight of it.

Liver spotted and bony crone's hands teased and massaged breasts covered by shiny pearl white lingerie. They left love bites down her neck and torso, two heads trailing sloppy kisses on Lady Mary's perfect belly and navel in a race down. George let out a disgusted and angry noise as he looked away, his mother's eyes burning with unblinking venom that knew nothing but to bring suffering to him. She kissed every set of lips that turned her head to be shared amongst the four. She allowed her body to be worshiped, to be laid back on the stone slab as the undead swooped down on her like feeding crows.

George sank into despair, an old rage filling him with crimson murder. But fighting against it was the haunted feelings of the last time he had made that choice. He wanted to kill, wanted to rip them to pieces so that they may never lay their wizen hands on anyone he loved again. But he had sworn he'd never allow such dark instincts to take over him. He had killed men since that day, but only in self-defense, protection of friends and the ones he loved. But he had sworn he'd never murder again. He heard the giggles, the slurping, the smacking of slobbery kisses and the rubbing of old sagging skin on young supple flesh. And still Lady Mary had not looked away from him, her eyes calling for him to watch, to know what they were doing to her.

"Dad …" He whimpered. "Dad please …" his hands covering his ears from the sound of Madeleine's screams, the crack of the whip, the ravishing of his mother by the evil crones, and the begging of his dead ancestors to be set free. "Dad" he whispered for help.

He didn't know what to do in the chaos. He didn't know who he was. All George Crawley had done his entire life was to try and be the man they said Matthew Crawley had been. He had tried and failed so many times to live up to that standard. Now all he wanted was to know what his father would've done, would do. How would he save Madeleine, how would he sooth the dead's fears …

How would he get his mama to love him again?

Suddenly a figure walked up to George as he lay helpless on the floor as the swirl of all his fears and insecurities hung over him like a black cloud of sleeted ice. He covered his ears, teeth gritted, eyes sealed shut, flinching at the dozens of scorpions skittering around and over him. The figure knelt gently by his side. The touch was not rough, angry, or aggressive as it gently lay upon him. The hand was slender, gentle, and filled with a lifetime of love. Cupping the boy's cheek, she leaned down and buried her face into his hair.

" _George …"_ She called to him in a whisper that was calm. _"George, my darling …"_ In her elegant and warm husky voice he felt the world go quiet. Her hand threaded through his curls as she shielded him with her body from his waking nightmares. She nuzzled his ear maternally. _"Darling …"_ She kept calling to him as if he she was trying to awaken a sleeping child. Slowly he opened an eye to still find his mother's stare fallen on him. She moaned and shuttered, her arms were pinned next to her head while being complemented on her taste. But they were flickering images as the figure that held him, protected him, and comforted him with an angelic love blurred it out with the pulse of her warm voice.

She was shadowed by the darkness of the room, but her entire frame was backed by the fallen lantern on the floor. Its light bathed her in an almost ethereal glow. She gently turned his head so that he could look her in the face. She was a young and beautiful girl with black curls and eyes that were just like his. She wore a lavender Edwardian blouse with a long sailor's collar, and a navy blue pencil skirt. A white bow that tied together one of Anna Bates perfect hair buns. He knew her face, he had seen her before. The day Cora died; she had been there when everyone else had forgotten him. Seeing the light of recognition in his eyes, the girl smiled softly and nodded.

" _It's not real."_ She said. _"Oh darling …"_ She looked to be almost in tears at his suffering, her voice cracking with emotion for him. _"It's not real."_ She kissed his forehead sympathetically as she shook her head. _"George, wake up, love, wake up!"_ She implored softly, urgently stroking his matching curls. When he closed his eyes, concentrating on her voice, he felt as if someone had flicked on the lights in the dark subterranean ice water mansion he was trapped in. The world quieted and stilled, there were no floor covered in bugs, no shouting of the dead, no psychotic old women, and no Lady Mary.

" _That's right my love … that's it."_ She kissed him and buried her face in his shoulder. _"Wake up, darling."_ She spoke into the leather.

The bull headed figure, forever with a foot in two worlds, halted his whipping of the debutante's soft flesh. He heard the polished voice, the new figure within the room. He halted his whipping motion mid crack, and turned behind him. There was the same expression, under the cowl, as when he first spotted Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley's wedding picture, snatching it in a stupor off of Martha Levinson's mantle.

George was on his knees now, his forearm and elbow supporting his weight. He looked like a boxer trying to beat the referee's count before he reached ten. Next to him was a young woman sing on her hip. She was whispering comforts and encouragement into his ear as she wrapped her arms lovingly around his chest from behind. Feeling the monster's eyes, she turned right back at him. It was the girl he had seen in his vision many decades before. When she looked at the frightening figure, she showed no fear, cast no doubt, nor shed the gentle nature. Then, as if the evil figure didn't exist at all, she turned back to the teenager that could've been her twin. The girl continued to whisper in his ear, nursing his strength back with her angelic touch. A fearful anger boiled over at the clear showing that this young woman didn't even consider the bull headed blasphemy a threat as she arrogantly continued to build George up with each maternal word and touch.

Dropping the whip into the dust, he left the helpless woman to tear stained, blissful, unconsciousness. She slumped forward limply, leaving her biting leather restraints to hold her up. He stalked the raven haired girl slowly, sneaking up behind her. Her nose was buried into the folded up back of the youth's leather collar, nodding in encouragement at the immerging soberness in the young man's matching eyes. Her hand was stroking his hair, her other placed, comfortingly, on his heart under jacket.

With a stony and calloused hand, he reached out to snatch the beauty up by her raven hair. She would suffer the same fate as the other English porcelain doll that he thoroughly disciplined for trying to help George Crawley escape his destiny. He could almost feel the silky hair of the girl's bun in his gasp.

THUNP!

What he got instead was a haymaker of iron, right into between the eyes of his bull headpiece. In an instant the girl was gone, and in his reach of molesting hands for her, he had led himself straight into George's counter. He had been so caught up in having the beauty; the preacher had not realized that the boy was playing possum once he and the girl heard him coming. Reeling from the direct hit, the beast noticed that the angel was nowhere to be found, while George had sprung to his feet.

The teenager pressed his attack, striking the preacher with heavy blows that backed him down. George's head was now clear, his fear had turned to anger that was slowly curdling into a rage that gave him a deadly focus. He had unleashed the pent up violence that had been fostered by the dark visions the powder had given him.

After being ambushed and backed away by punishment, the preacher planted his feet. He countered the powerful onslaught of rage and youth with a defensive jab. The hit was eaten by the teenager's guard, landing unaffectedly against two raised forearms. In the three years since their last fight, the boy had gained much more fighting experience down in the Rio Grande Valley and the West Texas Badlands. The preacher pressed his attack against George, sweeping his iron talons backward. Keeping his stance, George jerked back, letting it wave and miss in front of his face. Using a combo for defense, the bull headed figure threw a wild, defensive, haymaker at the boy, trying to break his guard. But instead of eating the punch, George ducked underneath the wide swing. Finding his opponent open, the teenager took advantage.

Weaving low, he began to broadside the cultist preacher with a barrage of swift punches, while circling him. He worked on the ribs and kidneys. A strangled roar of pain escaped the bull's open maw as the youth inflicted quick damage. When he completed the circle, George landed a devastating uppercut, jerking the bull head to an arch toward the ceiling. Vulnerable now, he followed it up with a surgical strike to the abomination's Solar Plexus.

The preacher folded like a lawn chair.

A rage filled the even keeled figure behind the theatrics. While bent over, using his pent up fury and pain, the man used his head piece as the animal he slaughtered for it would have when cornered. Using forward momentum, he charged George with his head down and horns up. He speared the youth right under the chest, the horns catching him under arms. Once again, resorting to his superior strength as a safeguard, he drove George back a few steps, before throwing his entire upper body up. The action tossed the teen into the air and landed him with a hard thud, skidding across the dirt and dust of the floor.

While George grunted, protected by his new leather jacket, the preacher saw the opportunity to press his advantage. But he felt his strength leave him as the shock wore off. A shooting pain ran up from all his pressure points. Their exchange of punches and counters had been in a lightning flash. But now, in the pause, they felt all the damage inflicted. However, the difference between George and the Cultist was that the boy was young, durable, and spirited. The preacher was neither of these things anymore. In the first and second fight, time, strength, and experience had been on his side. Now in just three short years he only had one of these advantages, and even that would soon change. He fell to a knee and cradled his upper body, breathing heavily.

With short breaths to offset the sharp pain in his ribs, the man keeled for a beat. Next to him, lay the discarded crowbar, which he had tossed aside to punish Crawley's British Dolly. Wincing in pain, he picked up the metal tool, looking to once again use it to beat the youth back down. He gripped it by the curve, using it like a cane as he pushed himself back to his feet. Turning it, he used the curve as a saber guard to wield it with the flat end as the offense. He pivoted and strode after the figure he thought had the wind knocked out of him.

There was a thunderous crack and snap that cut the air next to his headpiece. When George turned over, he had, in hand, the abandoned whip. With a momentum driven swing, he cracked the leather over his head, directing the tendril to wrap around the upraised crowbar. Jumping to his feet, George tugged the weapon from the preacher's hand and arced it away mid-air. Spinning uselessly away, it struck home right into Harold Levinson's gut. The shock and pain brought the man right back to consciousness, causing him to turn over, knees to chest, groaning through a pained chuckle. Using the momentum from the energy of the crowbar, the teenager brought the whip down hard, cracking it dangerously at the preacher, cutting his scorpion talisman in half. The voodoo necklace shattered its gold and jet everywhere. The destruction of the sacred item caused a mournful sound of hate to reverberate from inside the headpiece.

Harold turned over and inspected the setting. The last thing he had remembered was the KKK had ambushed them. He had tried to get Madeleine out before they took them. But with a glance he saw all five of them were lying dead in pools of their own blood. But just one look at the adversary that remained, made him swear that he'd never drink again, while, alternately, needing one really badly. But the through line was where Madeleine was.

"Oh my god!" he exclaimed, drawing attention to himself in the rage of the rematch between George and the Cultist Preacher. He found the slim, delicate, woman passed out, only held up by her restraints to the columns. She was topless, her supple bare back ripped raw, with angry lash marks lacerated and bleeding over her spine. "Madeleine!" he got to his feet, his one track mind ignoring the danger present that blocked his way.

The preacher lifted his talons, ready to cut Harold. But there was another crack that was as swift as lightning and as loud as thunder. George snapped the whip with a flick of the wrist, the lash catching the bull's eye on the right. The evil figure let out a howl, keeling over to cover his wound. While he turned his back, George gave him a taste of his own medicine, lashing him in the back. He screamed in surprise, the cloth of his stolen priest's robes ripping audibly.

Using the whip to change sides, George and the Preacher circled one another, clearing Harold's path to the captive girl. He sprang to her, trying hastily to comfort her, untying her tight leather straps. She collapsed into his arms, once freed. He placed her plaid jacket over her breasts, cradling her. There were visible tears as he rocked the woman back and forth. "It's going to be okay, we're gonna get out of here, sweetheart, we're going home … I'm gonna take us home." He said to her. Harold knew they didn't have one, but just a second in the crossfire of this hellish duel against this Minotaur in his family's maze, he'd find them a safe place for all time.

Finally, the preacher stood tall. For the first time in George's life, he saw but a glimmer of what was behind the headpiece. There was a gash through the fur and Kevlar that made up the bull's head. And within it, was a scarred and dead grey pupil staring right at the youth. A wound that seemed just as fresh as the day a young George Crawley had given it to him with a rusted nail. The preacher advanced toward the group slowly and purposefully, his robes floating at his feet.

"Harold, get her outta here!" George motioned to the now clear exit out of the Crypt. But the schlubby business man only clutched the woman he loved tightly to his chest, his concentration transfixed on the mutilated iris that protruded through the gash in the head piece.

"What about you …?" He asked distractedly.

For some reason, he was attacked by a memory of sitting out on the back porch of Amantha during a rainstorm. Cora and Robert were sitting out there, listening to it ping off the aluminum roof. His sister had been playing up the strange wonder of the sound to her fiancé all summer, and finally they had gotten some rain. They both had their eyes closed as they listened to the sound. Both were smiling, each one secretly opening an eye to look at the other, closing it before they were caught admiring the other's smile. It was the first time in Harold Levinson's life he ever considered if that was what true love was like. The memory was played, however, over George accusing him of being 'the worst uncle in the world' … he remembered just how much Cora and Robert had loved one another, and it felt wrong, to leave their only son to fight all alone.

"Don't worry about me!" George turned and cracked the whip. With split second reflex, the preacher caught the lash with his iron talons. With a snip and a tug, he ripped the whip from George's grip and snapped the weapon in half. Letting it fall to the dust.

"But I'm your uncle …" He said distractedly.

George gave him a double take. "Really, Asshole, Now?!" He shouted at him aggressively, in disbelief that after all this time, now, he wanted to be an uncle to his sister's family.

In defense of his moment of carpet bagging courage, the man seemed almost offended by his nephews tone. "Well, I mean …" He almost dismissively motioned to the frightening creature advancing with his hand. "You know?" He shrugged. George glared.

"You don't get points for being stupid … Scram!" He shouted at him. Harold looked only a moment conflicted before he picked up Madeleine's unconscious body and hustled toward the exit.

"I knew your mom and dad, they'd be proud of you." He shouted back at him encouragingly.

Annoyance fell over George's face, rolling his eyes to the ceiling at the comment. He was more than hundred percent sure Harold had never met his father before. However, when one thinks Lord and Lady Grantham were your parents … George turned back to the man.

"Stop trying to help me!" He snapped at him in angry annoyance.

Harold jumped at the shout. "Leaving, we're leaving, yep ..." Was the man's answer to the deadly irritation in the teenager's voice.

He refocused on the task at hand, the final confrontation with the great villain, the grand monster, which had defined his adventures in America. He was a dark figure who had murdered one matriarch and now threatened the very existence of the rest of his family and their survival in this worldwide Depression. As if reading George's mind, the preacher brandished the talons of his twisted metal hand in threat.

In response, the teenager crouched down and reached into his boot. He drew from it with a ring of metal on leather a silvery white Spanish blade that nearly glowed in the gloom of the cavern. It had red, green, and yellow Indian native symbols on the brass and leather hilt. It had once belonged to a Socialist Revolutionary Mercenary who had the unfortunate fate of pulling it on Lady Edith in Dejalo while in front of him. George spun it in the air, catching it with one hand. He demonstrated his ability with it, warming up, by flipping it in the air and catching on the flat end with the top of his wrist, before he bucked it in the air and caught it by the handle. From the Sicilian gangs in the docklands of New York during his smuggling days, roaming gangs of hobos in Memphis, on the streets of New Orleans, behind the racer's cantinas of the Border, and fighting Zoot Suiters in the back alleys of San Antonio …

The knife, and the ability to fight with it, was one of the first things George Crawley had learned from this Depression.

The Preacher was undeterred as the two figures circled one another. The youth kept spinning and twirling the knife, letting muscle memory inform the movements. There was something amateur, untrained, about the way that the dark figure came after George. The bull headed monster was not a fighter. He relied on deception, illusion, and chemistry to beguile his victims and inspire his minions. He had the strength of the animal whose head he wore, but it was raw. He never expected to fight his own battles. It showed when he swiped at George with his metal talons. There was an ear splitting ring of metal as blade met talon when George cross parried the blow.

Stepping forward, the teen slashed at his opponent, the counter ripping the air but nothing else, the preacher jerking back. Switching hands, George pivoted and lunged at the man. His stab went wide, the sound of shifting feet on stone and the flutter of robes echoed in the crypt. In the fallen lantern light, two large, dueling, silhouettes were projected on the stone walls of the crypt.

Swinging his metal hand backward, he attempted to catch George from behind. But the youth, like before, ducked under the wild swing. Flipping the blade upside down and shifting hands midair, the young fighter dropped to a knee and held the knife out. He let the preacher's forward momentum do the work. A deep, bloody, gash ran jaggedly across the preacher's torso in his stumbled step forward. A building groan of excruciation trembled as he nearly fell to the floor. His free hand clutched the wound in instinct. He looked down and saw it covered in hot sticky blood. George was expressionless, tossing his now bloody blade from hand to hand, spinning and catching it in the air expertly.

It was a forgone conclusion that the youth had the upper hand on him. This was not the same boy he had faced twice before. His abilities and strength had doubled since the last time they had met. He saw in his only chance for victory, in the only advantage he had left on the boy, which was in every fight they had.

George Crawley had anger, he had rage, but he did not kill with them.

In every meeting, there were times when the boy could've gotten the upper hand on him. But he always held back. In him was not the ability to take it to the next level. When push came to shove, George wouldn't allow himself to cross a line that could've ended this conflict much sooner than this night. And even now in the young man's eyes he saw that he was still only doing enough. In the end, he still strove to live up to a gallant dead man's example, and that meant sparing when he should kill.

Inside the monster, he summoned all his anger, his black rage, and entitlement to his purposed destiny. This destructive battle, this quest for power, it ended tonight. He hyped himself on the memories and sensations of a four decade long vision shown to him, he allowed the dark pleasures fill his lungs and move his body. With an animalistic scream, he let it drive him made as he charged the youth with his head down.

THUM!

Like a matador, George jumped out of the way from the madman's charge. The horns cratered the old stone marker of his great-great-grandmother. Ripping away from the crumbling stone, an old photograph of an auburn haired southern belle, creamy and enchanting, who looked much like her granddaughter, was impaled on his horns. In the end, what happened next could be considered divine intervention of vengeance for the murder of her daughter. For the framed picture of the kind hearted beauty, weighed and pulled at the headpiece. The result was a swipe of talons that was just off the mark. The obscured vision made it hard to track the youth that spun away from the assault. The frame circled and clicked, as he shook his head to get the woman off him. When she fell with a clatter, he turned to find his opponent …

And then he found him.

George drove his silvery knife right into the preacher's lower chest. The teenager gritted his teeth, digging deep with all his strength for the killing blow. The bulled headed preacher made no noise. A leak of blood oozed from the open bull's maw. Suddenly, the preacher reached out a stony fist and clubbed the boy in the cheekbone with it. But the boy did not let go, snarling, he punched the bull's head violently and then drove the knife up further into the preacher's chest. Shakily, the metal talons on his right hand began reaching for the boy's face. The struggle began, as George tried to hold off the advancing iron hand, while forcing up the knife. But the preacher still had the advantage of strength and the weight of metal was too much. Slowly, bloody cuts began to be carved over the boy's left eye. George growled in pain as he drove his knife up, but he had a choice. The kill or his eye, as the hook cut closer and closer to his eyeball.

Finally, he bailed, unhanding his knife. He stumbled away from his enemy, hand covering the wounded side of his face. He fell to the dust in pain, landing on something metal and hard. When he gripped it, his face fell, clutching it in panted breath. He turned over on the ground and saw the preacher gurgling and gasping, his arms extended as the Apache knife lay embedded in his chest. Blood leaked out of the open maw splattering on the ground. He fluttered in robes and stared at the young man watching him.

His voice was in heaved agony. "You cannot kill me, boy!" an oaken timber of shuttered madness thundered in the empty crypt. "I was blessed by the darkness while your mother was a planted seed … in what world could you win against the gods chosen own?!" the bleeding man began a slow, victorious, stride to the young man on the floor.

With a shaky breath of conflict, the boy closed his eyes, reaching underneath him. In his hand was Matthew's revolver, with just one shot left. Shaky hands pointed the weapon at the closing monster. But there was no fear or stopping in his sacred, holy steps toward his final hurdle till glory. George panted, blood leaking in his eye, as he aimed his weapon at this monster, this murderer. Yet, he did not fire. For underneath all of that clothing and abomination …

There was an unarmed man.

He tried to remember his dead friends, the burnt and blackened bones of his Granny Levinson, the helpless horror on his Granny's face when she learned of her mother's terrible fate. But inside of him, he still felt the soul of his father, who would never have shot an unarmed man. It went against the boy's nature, the sins of New York haunting him. He saw Rose's face, naked, covered in blood, and afraid … of him. He saw the way Madeleine looked at him when he had killed those Klansmen. He imagined the way his Aunt Edith, his Granny, Donk … his mother would see him if he did this. He looked up at something on the ceiling and then felt his heart drop and resignation fall over him.

CRACK!

The gunshot echoed with a roar that shook the crypt. The inhuman juggernaut halted at the smoke and fire that flashed in front of him. For a split second, the preacher thought he had underestimated the naïve teenager. But when there was nothing new to his blinding pain, he coughed blood, and continued on. He knew himself to be right about the youth. He was not prepared to do what was necessary. However, the sound of shifting, cracking, and crumbling echoed loudly in his ear. By the time he turned …

It had been too late.

The tilted column, which served as a poster to the honored tomb of mystery within the crypt, began to fall. Madeleine striking against it had knocked loose, and its stability but on the edge of the knife when she had been bound to it. Each cruel lash to her perfect bare back, loosened the column just a little more. All it had taken was on well-aimed shot to the last stone holding it in place. It looked like the hand of a Titan, crushing the puny being made of mud, who thought himself a god.

For a long moment, George watched the sediment and dust cloud the impact area. Shakily he lowered his father and aunts, now empty, revolver. He gave a deep breath and had lain back on the floor. He allowed the adrenaline to drain away as the gloomy shadows lay still once again. Collecting himself, he stirred when he heard the coughing and wheezing. He gingerly covered his talon scratched left eye while he sat up. The broken column lay in five sections on the floor. He couldn't see what was beyond it, but he had an idea.

He groaned in pain as he breathlessly forced himself to his feet. Blood ran down his three lacerations, puddling in his tear duct, turning his blue eye bloodshot. He walked forward, still holding his gun, toward the wreckage. There, underneath the broken Roman column, was the blight, the dark mark on the last seven years of his life … dying.

The stone structure had fallen on him from the side, crushing his lower body up to the pelvis and lower stomach. George's Spanish blade still lay embedded in his bloody chest. With each noise and cough, blood spouted from the bulls open mouth. The preacher wheezed and moaned in his death throws, but at the scuff of stone, he turned to see George standing over him. His scarred dead eye raked over the figure sightlessly from the slash in his headpiece. After a long pause, something strangled and awful gurgled from his throat. It was a final laugh filled with mirthfully black hatred.

"No one …" He wheezed. "No one will know …" He looked away from George. "Know, you's never had it in you, boy." He sucked on blood that was choking him. "They'll … they'll call you killer. But you ain't nothing of the … sort." His voice started to fade away. "Nothin … but … a … Coward." He wheezed harshly. "You … ain't … nothin." He relaxed and never spoke again.

For a long moment George said nothing. Then, slipping his gun back in leather, he bent down and pulled his blade from the dead beast's chest, cleaning it off on the dusty robes. A spark of curiosity shot through the young man. Staring at the bull's head, he felt an urge, a pull that he couldn't quite control … he wanted to know. A hand reached for the headpiece, ready to peal it off, to reveal the face of the enemy that had made him who he was, what he had become. But, eventually, George's hand halted just above the snout. In the end, what did it matter what his mask looked like underneath. As far as George, as far as the preacher was concerned, the true face was what the teenager saw, not what he hid. He stood straight and blinked. Now that the preacher was gone, there was a wave of closure, relief, which filled him. Solemnly he turned his back on the man and felt light headed. He sat on the stone column tiredly. In the stillness and quiet of the crypt he closed his eyes and remembered.

Some had said that the war had its final battle at the very gravel road, flanked by arching willow trees, which led to the ancient Gothic mansion of Amantha. That it ended with imprisoned KKK members, with a few amongst their ranks escaping. But in reality, the final battle of the war had and would be fought three years later, tonight, here, amongst the dead. Not just the tombs inside the crypt, but all the dead bodies of the murdered share croppers, footmen, maids, and child freedom fighters. All of them murdered at the monster's hands. Now they could find their rest in the shining stars that surrounded the bright winter's moon above.

It was all over.

He gave a long sigh. There was no mistaking that this victory had changed him. He was made different by it, by all the things done and seen within this night. It was seen, clear as day, when he opened his blue eyes and there was something hardened in them, steel that wasn't there before. Sheathing his knife in his boot, the youth stood at full height, a man.

He looked down on his fallen enemy. The figure had once been so larger than life to a child. Now, in his death, he seemed so small, so … insignificant. It seemed like a great waste of time and emotion that went into the hatred this man had inside him, and had bred in others. Before he finished what he came here for, George Crawley spared only a moment on his goodbye to the shadowy evil at his back for the last seven years.

A glob of spit struck the dead eye of a monster and ran down the gash in its headpiece.

Beating the dust off his Outback Fedora on his denim pant leg, George slipped it back on. Reaching down, he picked up the fallen lantern off its side. His paces clacked loudly in the silent and forgotten crypt. Stepping over the ruins of the column, he walked to the side of the open tomb that they had come for the secrets that was hidden within. He held up the lantern and leaned down to peer into the stone grave.

Inside had been the skeletal remains of a female figure, her skeletal hands were lain across her chest. She was dressed in brown, leather, triangle top and matching skirt with exposed mid-drift. It was the clothing of an African Princess. George frowned at the chest of her leather top and the blackened outline of some design of a necklace's pendent that had been around her neck for a century. George traced the outline with his finger, but his sigh of defeat was halted. On her leather and bon pelvis a crumbled envelope sat next to a piece of glossy paper. They were items that had been captured by the preacher, but seemed to have fallen out of the man's robe pockets when he attacked George and Madeleine. Setting the Lantern at the edge of the tomb, George picked up the items. The youth's face was unreadable, when he gazed at the glossy paper in the light.

Matthew Crawley, and his bride, Lady Mary, looked to the camera. The photographer had told them not to smile, to think of something serious. But this day, this moment, how could a mere mortal man ask such impossibilities? Lady Mary was supposed to be sitting in a chair, Matthew behind her, his hand on her shoulder. But the bride would not have it, and neither would the groom. Matthew stood behind his wife, god how he couldn't stop calling her that, his wife, that day. His arms were wrapped around her waist, his head next to hers as she leaned into him. There was nothing but sheer love and affection in their eyes as the day long remembered, and sought for, was upon them. They had touched forever in a day, and captured it's grandeur in a photograph. For seven long years had they been captive to a man who saw their love as nothing but torment, a noose hanging above his head. It was an evil figure that spat and cursed them every night and sunrise. Now their loving smiles, was that of freedom, of being returned to their rightful place in their child's hands and under his eyes. George kissed the picture with a hitched breath of emotion, holding it to his face with a tired sigh, closing his eyes. It had been so long since he had seen their faces, both of them. And in the love shown in this captured moment in time, George remembered. It was even in the blackest of winter's nights, they showed him who he had been and still was.

Tears welled in his eyes as he shifted the picture in hand. With a clear of his throat, George opened an envelope that had his name written in blue ink. It was unmistakably Martha Levinson's handwriting. The letter was seven years old, preserved by the beaten and stained envelope. His eyes fell over the one sentence written, once, and then twice.

A disgusted scoff left his throat. The teenager crunched the note in hand, jaw screwed tightly, as he looked away. With a disbelieving sigh, he pulled it back taut and read it again. Turning his head away as if the letters pained him physically, George squeezed his eyes shut, till his gashed cuts burned. There was a self-loathing snort as he sighed again. He bit his lip and gazed down at the picture of his parents. He glared at the smiling faces, that at this moment, seemed to mock him.

"Shut up …" He muttered with a shake of his head.

Pocketing the picture with his stuffed great dame, he read the note one last time. With a shake of his head he shoved it in his inner coat pocket. Lowering his head he removed his hat and ran his hands through his grown out black curls.

Looking around him, the ruins, the bodies, and the destruction, it perfectly summed up his years in America. He had been from one coast to the other, traveled through the deserts, climbed wooded hills, and crossed the bayous. George had seen and did more in this land than anyone would ever know in his life. But with the preacher lying dead at his feet, the last anchor to this foreign land of his ancestors, the last debt to be paid, there was no other way around it. After all his hardships and adventures in the long journeys of eight years, George Crawley would do the hardest thing he had ever done …

Go home.

There was a melancholy and sorrow in the leaving of a place that would see the last of their sons, the last that would remember they had been here. Slowly, George placed his hat back on, his lantern lit silhouette passing up the stairs into the witching hour of Christmas Eve. In his disappearance the darkness whispered the last message given to George by Martha Levinson.

" **The Answer Lies Within Lady Mary."**

* * *

 _Acknowledgements_

"The Atlantean Sword" – Basil Poledouris

"O'Death" – Ralph Stanley

"Loch Lomond" – Old Scottish Jacobite ballad


	15. Interlude: Part III - Jumper

**Interlude: Part III**

 _Jumper_

It had been a cold autumn night when a dozen or more men arrived at the iron gates of San Sochi mansion. It was a princess castle in an abandoned nook on the once opulent Fifth Avenue. The first flurries of the year 1932 had been touching the pavement of the abandoned ruins of the Gilded Age, when five mounted men with weapons escorted a truck filled with Pinkerton Detectives. They were dressed in caps and coats, carrying clubs, pikes, bayonets, and arson equipment. The passer byes on the street paused as the snowplow fitted truck backed up and rammed the gate, and then repeated till it fell. Those who got a closer look noticed a large man on horse. He wore a bowler hat, fur lined coat, and had a cigar in his mouth. There was a sort of arrogance and mockery to his face while reading a piece of paper. The messenger was a tall and skinny man with a beaked nose and grey, tweed, fedora hat. He was anxious and outraged in protest.

Bertie Pelham, the Marquis of Hexham, stood alone against many men. He had come from the Empire's Royal Consulate in order to warn the urban mercenaries that the Levinson's New York home was property of British Citizenry, and thus subject to English Law. It was a slim argument, but he had hoped that it would've been enough. And it might have, if the lead man, with a scarred chin from the war, actually cared either way. An American Senator had greased the right palms, had pimped his frilly, spoiled, little girl out to the right men. They couldn't touch the Future Lords and Lady Sinderby who were waiting at the consulate for passage back to Yorkshire. But they didn't come here for them. The Senator only wanted one future English Lord's scalp in particular. And the job would be done no matter the consequence or what Bertie Pelham or the British Home Office said. That was clear enough when the English diplomat was viciously beaten and left bleeding in the snowy sidewalk.

He hadn't woken since …

Sending 'the cavalry' to cover the points, the big, tough, men jumped out of the truck and began the siege. They busted stained glass reproductions of French Renaissance cathedrals that Martha Levinson had painstakingly studied to fine detail. But with the intentions to enter the home, they found themselves blocked out by heavy oaken shelves pushed against the sills. It took half an hour to batter down the ancient doors purchased from a Swiss Castle. In the meantime, dozens of onlookers, the people who had grown up knowing San Sochi during their day to day walks down the steamy streets for half a century. They were people who remembered crowding around the church to see the beautiful Cora Levinson in her silk and Lace Worth gown marry her English Lord, cheering as she rode by in her carriage. They shouldn't have really cared all that much over the many years. But, there was something about that lovely princess, in the smile and wave to the people before she and her brother entered the church, which gave them a sense of ownership to those memories and this place. It was all those feelings that had them run to the police in haste. But the beat officers simply placed their hands behind their backs and blinked at the alarm of the citizens. They had been taken aside by the duty officer at the precinct. It would be a Happy Thanksgiving and a 'very' Merry Christmas when the blood money was spent.

By the time they broke down the heavy doors, storming in, they found no resistance, no one waiting. The opulence of the great palatial mansion was now obscured in shadows, covered in a grey hue. It was a haunted castle from every story book's fairytale ever read. It had been abandoned, forgotten, its crystal and shining banisters covered in cobwebs and dust. The life, the very magic that had made this place had long left it. It had been stolen away in the years of emptiness, in the very sorrow of the new widow that had built it to mask a crippling grief. All that was left of its glorious yesterdays were the hum of a ghostly string orchestra of the past, and the psychobabble of thousands of conversations echoing from the blackened grand ballroom. Hundreds had been fit in the large auditorium, they wore lavished costumes of historical figures they strove, in their wealth, to be like. Hundreds of Footmen in Rococo, traveling the currents of silk, lace, and satin clad guests with priceless party favors on silver trays to be taken at leisure. Now a kingdom of cobwebs strung out and connected silvery tendrils across a great swath of low hanging chandeliers that had lost their shine in the dim, grey, light. No music, no Louis the XIV, no King Arthur, no Cleopatra, and no Princess Aurora to be found. All that was left had been the ghosts of a gilded past, the first haunted footsteps of dozens of journeys that began here in these wintery city streets. Yet, it only ended in tragedy inside the cold, Lordly, halls of many English Country Estates. They all had fallen to ruin with the old fortunes that were no more in the years of War and Depression. San Sochi was a tombstone to the mass grave of American Heiress dreams that found only sorrow in their pursuits of titles and societal notoriety.

As the mercenaries stormed the rooms, looking for their prey, they couldn't imagine how anyone, much less a kid, could live in such a place for so long. Fore even then, armed, adrenaline up, there were dark corners and locked rooms that no Pinkerton dared to enter. It was a dark place, filled with the collected sorrow of many broken hearted lover who found only ruin in the love sought of a titled Peer at the balls held here. There were many dark places in the house, too many to find their 'wolf's head'.

So they burned it to the ground.

As they broke down doors and smashed relics of Europe's own past, George Crawley escaped San Sochi through the servant's corridors and out the boiler room basement. Slipping on old coal dust and fresh sleet, he spilt out to an alley. There, he was confronted by a mounted Pinkerton. The man didn't hesitate, not stopped by the boy's size or age. He immediately threw down on him with a shotgun. Without thinking, George drew his father's gun first, and with an echoing explosion of lead and smoke he shot the man off his mount. The boy had looked on in stunned silence for a long moment at the weapon. A black cold ran through his veins at the frightening ease of his gunfighter's draw and the ability to kill with it. But shouting and footsteps began drawing closer at the noise. Out of instinct, he fled to the horse in fear.

There had only been one thing that Lady Mary had ever taught her son in his life, and it would be his only chance to escape. Vaulting onto its back, George stole the dead thug's mount. The sound of crackling flames was pierced by the rapid galloping clops as George charged out of the slippery alley and into the night. His striding shadow was cast in silhouette against the glow of the great manor on fire. Pinkertons dodged and fled out of the way as the boy jumped his stolen steed over the hood of the truck blocking the gate. As he fled, there was something horribly stricken to the heart in the great spectacle of the Gilded Age, a perfect recreation of the grandeur of European palaces, burned away to nothing. People ran and screamed from the gunshots and shouting that followed the mounted outlaw down Fifth Avenue. Like a western cowboy, the boy turned, and shot back with his revolver as he raced between car and foot traffic. He crouched his rustled horse against whizzing Tommy Gun fire as he disappeared into the steam clouds that selected the melted falling snow of late autumn.

Once to safety in Hell's Kitchen, a place inhospitable to law enforcement, official and mercenary, George and Jonah were determined to get out of New York. The docks, Central Station, and the British Consulate were heavily watched by Pinkertons who had orders to waist any twelve year old that tried to get past the gates. Knowing the situation, there was little options open. They had no choice but to go down to New Orleans. There, he'd find his Granny Levinson and his ticket back home to Downton. Jonah didn't know much about England, but he figured that they had to have jobs over there. He was a good'ole country boy, and George said that Mr. Mason was always looking for hands.

When the Stock Market crashed in '29, it had been eleven months since George had last seen his Great-Granny Levinson. She had sent him on a tour of the west, to show him the deserts, hills, and ocean of California. Live the spectacle of the great mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It had been a campaign of imagination, a trip to expand his understanding of the world. His mother and aunts had come to America a handful of times and never breached the City of New York pierced 54th street, never passed the confines of Newport Society. Sybil had always wanted to see the rest of the country, but Mary and Edith weren't interested. Violet Crawley, then the Countess, had filled her eldest granddaughters with fearful tales of the red Indians that roamed the plains and the horrible desperados that would rob them on the trails. Martha wouldn't allow the same thing to happen to her Great-Grandchildren as well. George would be the first Crawley since his Grandfather and Aunt Rosamund stayed at Amantha to set foot past Newport.

However, he had been in Seattle when the world went into chaos. When he arrived in Cincinnati, Martha was nowhere to be found. The old woman, however, left George a note explaining that she had gone to New Orleans to get something precious that was important to all their survival. Her instructions were to wait for her at San Sochi. So he did, for three years, but she never came. In fact, no one heard from Martha Levinson ever again. George had tried to sound the warning bell to his Aunt Edith and Granny in letters, but neither could go to New Orleans to check on her. Cora wrote to the Sheriff's Department as well to Harold who was also missing.

But no one ever returned her letters.

After running, fighting, and hiding from Pinkerton's from New York to the rail junction in the Shenandoah Valley, jumping trains and riding on truck beds along the way, they finally escaped the reach of Knickerbocker influence. In Tennessee they began a hard and argues journey through the savage wintery abode of the rugged and foggy Smokey Mountains in the dead of mid-November. Starving and frozen they arrived to the streets of Memphis only to be tasked, as all vagabonds had been, to deal with the Railroad Detectives and corrupt police. They escaped the violent hobo gangs in Hooverville Shanty Towns only to end up sentenced to cold and hardened days on a chain gang. Eventually, they were rescued and heartened from their chain and laborer's hammer by Lady Edith who found them by lucks chance. The Marchioness had studied the railroad maps of America in the Downton Library night and day while everyone else fretted over Rose's separation from Atticus, Bertie's brain injuries, and despaired of George's disappearance over teas. Looking for George seemed easier than waiting day and night over Bertie's bedside, praying he'd wake up. She had tried to leave Marigold behind, but the girl wouldn't hear of it. She had lost her father figure to brutality and she couldn't sleep till she knew George was found and okay.

Together Edith, Marigold, and the boys had drawn up a plan to make a break for Charleston South Carolina and get back to England. It might have worked, but they were ambushed by State Law Enforcement. Lady Edith and Marigold were apprehended and sent back to New York for deportation by way of favor to a New York Senator by the Southern Democratic Caucus. The favor meant the Democrats would get their flooding of private property, their dam, their electricity, and J. Edgar Hoover and the Congressional Republicans off the backs of their Lynch Mobs. The children escaped the ambush by way of riverboat, helped by Marigold. The girl desperately wanted George to take her with him, crying into his chest. But the boy wouldn't allow her to come. Even at twelve years old, he knew that the road wouldn't be a pleasant one, though made infinitely harder without a girl he had loved since she first arrived in the Nursery. But he knew that the police, while dirty, was filled with enough Southern charm that they'd never hurt the pretty little girl or her 'Aunt'. Till the day he died, it was the hardest thing George Crawley ever did, to leave the most perfect angel ever created crying on a midnight dock in Memphis as their river boat disappeared into the fog.

The boys once again, with heavy hearts, had no choice but to push on to New Orleans all alone.

George, Jonah, and now their new companions Charlie "Lead Belly" Stedman and Jack McMurray, had a Winter's journey through the dense forests of The South. In their travels they came across many strange sights to behold, camping in the tangled ruins of the old South that was hidden in the forgotten paths. They walked the dusty back roads of Mississippi, occupied by hard working, sweaty, chain gangs in pinstripe that sang to the beat of their ringing hammer. In the cold nights they slept in wild and untended cotton fields, waking up in the violet and orange light of predawn with white fluff caked to their coats and knitted caps. Each one of them had moments of fear, of doubt, in the long quest through the desperately impoverished country. But they also found their confidence, a sense of freedom, and exploration that developed them into survivors. For the thousands of the like-minded, wandering children, those desperate and mysterious days of high adventure would develop them into young men of action who would win a World War someday. At all times could there be laughter, smiles, mischief, and old convict songs heard amongst their company as they navigated unfamiliar picturesque landscape with nothing but friendship, courage, and the mighty Mississippi to guide them. The further south they went, the more they had turned the plantation that Martha Levinson had disappeared too, the century old Amantha House, the Gothic Southern Mansion where Cora Levinson had been raised so gently, as the answer to their prayers.

But when they got to Amantha, they were filled with the very example of the dread that anyone who came upon the old gothic manor was intended to have by the invaders of it. Hiding in the bushes, they watched in fear and horror at the blackest sight any child had ever seen.

There were dozens of men in white robes and hoods that stood in formations on the front lawn of the mansion. Preaching to them from the front porch was a tall man in a red robe. He had on a voodoo talisman of a scorpion made of jade with ruby eyes that pierced the very soul. But the most frightening thing of this tall figure was the unnatural black bull's, severed, head he had worn as a ceremonial headpiece. There was something dark and sinister in the words he spoke, like they weren't even human at all. Everything beautiful and picturesque described to George by his Granny was nowhere to be found in this place twisted by the evil committed here.

In front of the porch and the man preaching violent words, was erected a large cross, blackened by soot. There, crucified upon it, were the old, charred, skeletal remains of what used to be a person who had been burned upon it. On the great oak tree, where a picture had been taken of a young and beautiful teenage Cora, who sat on a rope swing that had always graced his Donk's desk, was now defiled by raggedly clothed skeletons. They were the maids, footmen, and farmers of the property that were hung upside down from its limbs. They had tortured the staff for information, and finally slit their throats when they had nothing to say but to beg for death.

This monstrous, faceless, zealot of some evil religion practiced in the dark corners of the Voodoo shops of the French Quarter, had come to the mansion looking for something. It was the same thing that Martha Levinson had come for when the world was breaking down. While she assembled what was needed to save her Great-Grandchildren's futures, evil had ridden up to the very doors of Amantha.

The boy's celebrated New Year's 1933 cutting down and burying skeletons at the foot of the willow tree. George looked everywhere for his Great granny Levinson's body, but couldn't find her. It wasn't till he looked up at the cross when he realized ...

Later, George would lie to Lady Grantham when he said they never found her mother's body.

* * *

London

 _1936_

There was a soft echo of jazz music and chattered noise of high class parties that filled the streamlined office that sat above the packed nightclub. There was a large desk filled with papers, receipts, and a glass of bourbon half full next to the bottle. Two art deco statues of mermaids with fish like eyes flanked the doorway, centerpieces that were taken out of the original design to make room for the 'Hall of Heroes' downstairs near the VIP area. There was a hazy neon glow from the outside marquee that reflected off of a tank aquarium filled with the, variety, over the counter, fish from a pet store. The bubbling water and reflecting neon created a strange hazy image on the desk and papers.

Jonah Robinson stared blankly at the fish that floated and glided in front of him, their mouths opening and shutting, mouthing unintelligible sounds. It had been Marigold's idea for a fish tank, she and Charlie saw a movie a couple of months ago and the head honcho in the Noir had a fish tank. They apparently turned to one another and seemed to have the same shared thought. It did give it an air of class, he would admit, but a part of him felt it made him a phony. Because, every time he looked at the silky and sleek creatures with their big bug eyes, he couldn't think of anything else but …

He used to eat these damn things.

Was it the prize of being successful? Or was it him just playing at it? He felt like he was just giving another sprinkle of magic dust over a country boy. Out there, in London Society, he was a suave, go-getter. But in here he was another share-cropper's son just trying to keep a promise he made in a Baton Rouge prison.

Before their little party had reached Amantha, Jonah had wanted to see his momma and daddy one more time before going to England. But what they found when he got home was nothing but horrible things waiting. Jonah's father was in prison, his house burned out.

Mr. Robinson had tried hard, worked into the night, and did everything he could. But he just couldn't make the rent. When they came to evict him and his wife from the land, the sheriff was drunk and careless. As Mr. Robinson begged for them to just give him more time, his wife, Jonah's mother, was packing their most important items. To make a point, the sheriff fired a shot at the house. It blew a hole in the window and went right through Mrs. Robinson's chest. In a rage of grief and anger at the portly drunk man, Mr. Robinson had pulled him off his horse and beat him to death with his own shotgun butt. It would be the electric chair for the farmer when the boys had gotten there. George didn't have a father, and he had been much too young to understand the loss at the time. But he felt all the sadness and weight of the world for his best friend, as the teenager knelt by the prison cell where his daddy held him for the last time with prison bars between them.

He had made Jonah promise that he'd go over to England and make something of himself. And god only knows that he had been trying since their war in New Orleans had ended. Maybe it was just growing up black in the South, or all the insecurities of watching his daddy bow and scrape to keep them on their farm, but he never felt secure. Even in the roaring success of their opening night, he felt like he should've been somewhere else. This was his dream since sweeping up at a Dutch hat shop in Manhattan. But he just didn't feel himself with all these fancy Lords and Ladies. But it beat the hell out of all the hard memories of the cold Smoky Mountains in Tennessee or nickel's worth of pet store fish in Mississippi to have some sort of meat in George's stew made from pond water and a recipe that his family cook taught him.

"I should've been there …"

Jonah said gravely with a deep regret in his smooth voice. His line of thinking brought on by the story his friend had told of the final fight between the Cult preacher and George. He could've and would've put off the opening of the club, called down Sybbie or Lady Edith herself to host the opening. He would've done anything if he knew that George was going down to the 'Big Easy' one more time to finish what a couple of angry and vengeful rebels had started at Amatha years ago. He owed him, them, their fallen friends on the wall downstairs, at least that. He would've liked nothing better than to look into the eyes of that monster as the life left him and his Klansmen.

He turned from his fish tank to a raven haired youth that had a glass of liquor as he sat with his feet up on the desk. His boots were scuffed with age and use, his blue eyes staring with interest at the mermaids. George sighed and shook his head, taking a drink.

"We were playing for keeps, Jonah." He said as if it was a deterrent. To make his point, he placed his iced glass over his scarred eye, wincing at the sting of cold perspiration on the deep gashes.

There was something offended about the statement in the black youth's face. "In all the years we've ran together, since when haven't we played for keeps, Swashbuckler?" He raised an eyebrow, his voice taking a stern tone of toughness that no Lord or Lady in England knew was inside the dashing, handsome, youth.

"Timing was of the essence, I couldn't wait for you to tear yourself away from all of this, to get across the Atlantic. Plus, I'm talking gun and knife fighting, fist-to-cuffs … and last time I checked that was never much your racket." He pointed a wet finger from the hand holding the glass at his friend in defense, taking a sip and sucking in his breath in pain when placing the freezing glass against his scars. It was a paradox of trying to dull the pain of the cure. It seemed a passing irony that a young man poised to inherit an Earldom and Peerage, was the fighter, and the Louisiana farm boy, the lover.

There was a grunt of annoyance. "You've forgot that mess in Itabuna with 'Baby Face' Nelson." Jonah pointed out. He felt it would've been remise not to remind his friend of their brush up with the one time, 'World Famous', bank robber in Mississippi.

"Nelson traded fire with me and the police in the town square while you hid under the craft's table at the fair. We were all just lucky that our fearless hero was crawling out for a better hiding spot, when he was running by."

"Damn right you were …"

"Jonah, come on, he tripped over you, his chopper sawed off a limb from the town oak in front of the court house and it fell on him."

"Yeah, but I still knocked him out."

"Technically, you'd be right."

"I know I'm right …" The club owner smiled factiously. "And if we weren't in goddamn 'hick town' Mississippi, they've given the bounty on 'Baby Face' to me, instead of you telling them I was your damn valet and them paying you instead." He grabbed up his liquor bitterly and slugged it back to put a period on his point.

George glared grudgingly. "A bounty that could've gotten us to New Orleans by riverboat two weeks early, but instead you spent it on cards and dames twice our age!" He shook his head. "By the way, in case you're wondering, cards and hookers named "Muddy Mississippi" and "Annie Oakland" are always gonna be your speed." He grunted.

There was a charged pause between two glaring figures, before a big smile devolved into nostalgic laughter. "Well, I still think you missed out with Melissa Claire the self-proclaimed "Cotton Queen of Vicksburg" … she was a real Belle for a white girl." He smiled fondly of the pitifully skinny thirty-two year old woman with dark red hair, a dress made of a potato sack, and missing three of her front teeth that her third husband had punched out. Though later she assured the boys that it was a fair trade. She busted him in the knees with an iron skillet and left him the hog pen. Eventually, all of them would get hungry … it was just a matter of who would eat who, first?

George watched his dapper friend pour himself a new glass. "First of all, I was a twelve year old who already had one bad experience with Sex. Lastly, I think losing my virginity to an older woman who called the gap in her teeth "The Cotton Gin" would've only made it worse." He shook his head.

A laugh escaped his friend's throat. "What the hell was that all about anyway?" He frowned in chuckled puzzlement as he set down the bottle of booze.

"You tell me … you were the one that blew our reward on her." George sipped his drink, making a face at high end alcohol that he didn't have a taste for.

"Ohhh …" Smirking at the gag noise that Jonah wasn't sure his friend was making at the memory of the hooker or the high end booze. He leaned over and clinked his glass against George's while he cursed the taste. "I think you're still far too young to find that out, Master Crawley." He made a deep mocking voice of a grave English Butler. There was something very Carson sounding that made George smirk as he iced his wounds and leaned back.

There was a comfortable quiet between the two oldest of friends as they listened to the sound of a dream come true. It was in the band music, in the laughter and admonishment of the crowd. All the heart ache, all the starving, cold days, and humid, lonely, nights in the bayou. All of it enhanced this moment, this dream, of the two of them sitting in the office, in the adoration of success of a life down below.

It nearly brought a tear to their eyes and the two tough guys just couldn't allow that.

"Alright …" Jonah cleared his throat. "Enough bullshit, George …" He proclaimed sitting up straight in his chair. "I wanna see her." There was a glimmer in his eye.

The younger teen got a mischievous twist in the corner of his lip. "See who?" He closed his eye, letting the wet cold run down his scars as he leaned back further.

"Come on, son …" He glared. "You said you got her, now I wanna see her." He demanded. "We bled for her, we fought for her, and we lost Eddy, Becca, Jackson, and Rod for her ain't we? I mean … Goddamnit, boy, if I at least don't get a chance to hold her in this here office and look at her!" He thumped his fist on the table. There was something spirited in his voice that was hung on a hungry anticipation that years and death had built up.

"Alright, alright, don't lose your shorts." George chuckled, making the process excruciatingly painful in the slow way he moved. George put his feet down and sat up. He reached into his double breasted leather coat and pulled out an item.

It was what a Cultist Preacher born in the dark alleys of the French Quarter had murdered Martha Levinson and all of her household staff and servants for. An item that spurred inhuman atrocities that led the forming of a group of young rebels named "The Runaways". And it was an item that a cultist fought George Crawley, and died for.

From the young man's inner pocket he pulled out a hauntingly beautiful, Victorian doll made with a porcelain white face that was lifelike. The crafted item had a tangle of long, luscious, dark hair. She was the very painted perfection of beauty and regal elegance. Her eyes had a red tint to them that seemed almost sad. There was something sympathetic that tore through one's heart. It made you love her, want to hold and kiss her, to keep her safe.

She was made of magic.

"Jonah, let me introduce you to what we fought our war over … meet 'Lady Mary'." George presented her.

But to Jonah Robinson, he simply stared at this beautiful Romanov courtier in her satiny white gown of purity and bejeweled tiara, and then turned to his friend. It hadn't dawned on Jonah till a closer inspection. The longer he stared at the doll, the more it was clear that she looked almost exactly like …

"Listen, George …" He drew out sulkily with a glare. "Those Gypsy and Voodoo magic peddlers with their crystal balls and spell books … they talk a good game. But, c'mon man! Why can't you just call your momma a bitch, cry about it, and make up like everyone else in your weird family does? Why the extreme? I mean, a Voodoo Doll? Really?!" he frowned with a worried look. "I think that animal hit you harder in that crypt than anyone thought, brother!" He shook his head.

George glared at the insinuation. "I flew across an ocean with this thing, trust me, okay, I know exactly who she looks like." He said flatly. "I'm not talking metaphor here …" George replied staunchly. "This is what that asshole was looking for … this is what everyone was looking for. Little Lady Mary … my Granny's favorite doll, favorite thing, in the whole world, once upon a time." He pointed to the doll.

"Please …" Jonah shook his head in disbelief till George handed him a folded and crumpled note. The youth stood up and paced away from the desk as he read Martha Levinson's final writing.

" _ **The Answer Lies In Lady Mary."**_

With a bottled frustration, the young man plopped down in his seat. He snatched the old dolly out of his friend's hand. "I mean …" He scanned the dolls beautiful face for anything special at all. "This is the answer, this fucked up looking doll?" He asked with a rhetorical helplessness. "All that fighting … for what?" He asked quietly. Suddenly he felt the fire again and held up the priceless, one of a kind, doll.

"I mean what the hell is this anyway?" He asked.

"Something my Grandmother got from her Grandmother. Had it made special in downtown New Orleans. Some Voodoo woman named Momma Cottonmouth gave Granny a palm reading, and then designed her from what she saw in her crystal ball. Told Granny that if she loved her enough, kept her at her side at all times, she'd become real and love her forever." He said uncomfortably as they both looked at the lifelike doll in hand.

Both George and Jonah had seen much in their adventures and quest together across the great lands between the Mississippi and the Atlantic. They had seen too much to dismiss the story of Momma Cottonmouth and her promise to a sweet little girl over fifty years ago. There was also the rumor, the unspoken oddity that had reached George, even all the way in America, that people were starting to notice that since Matthew Crawley's death … Lady Mary hadn't aged a day. Even now, the doll looked to be a proper and regal woman in her late twenties, the same age as his mother when his father died. Suddenly, the rumors that his Granny used to talk to it and carry it with her all the way up to womanhood … till the night that Mary Crawley was conceived, made George get slightly anxious.

Feeling that he was handling something supernatural, Jonah dropped the doll on the desk unceremoniously with a thump. "Why do you people always mess with that creepy shit? Some evil witch doctor curses a mask in Africa, everyone else in their right mind stay away from it, but no, not you limey Lords and Ladies. Your dumbasses think it'll look good in your damn kid's room!" he complained rubbing his palms on his pant legs furiously.

"True enough …" George agreed.

Downton Abbey had been home to a collection of strange Egyptian artifacts that his Donk and Granny made off with on their honeymoon. They were warned that they were cursed artifacts, but, always the diplomat, his Donk's reply was "What isn't in this infernal country?" Which one has to wonder if he believed in the curse yet after the last eighteen years?

Snorting in amusement, George pulled Little Lady Mary toward him. "When I first read that letter, I was pretty upset. I thought that Granny Levinson was trying to tell me that I should go home and reconnect with mom … but then I actually thought about it and it didn't make sense."

"Why?"

"Simple, my Great-Grandmother hated mom." He shrugged.

"Seriously?"

"Too English, too high on her horse, probably too grand. Too much like Granny Violet … I mean, you've been here for three years, you spend time with Aunt Edith … when you've met my mom does she strike you as someone people like?" He asked rhetorically. When he got a head shake of confirmation, he continued. "So obviously I knew that she didn't give some big, powerful, artifact to 'Queen Mary' to keep. Then, I remembered that story about Granny that used to make the Knickerbocker rounds when I was in New York. It was about her and a doll that she used to carry around … probably much longer than she should've." George cleared his throat in embarrassment for the young beauty decades before him.

"So I went down to Newport, broke into the mansion there and found Lady Mary, here, in the private safe." He patted the doll's belly. "As you can imagine I was pissed. Everything we did, everyone we lost, for a stupid doll that shares the world's most punchable face. It didn't occur to me till later to take the note as instructions." He explained.

Slowly he hiked the beauty's skirt up to her crafted hips and began to spread her legs. Jonah watched in shock at the slow, almost sensual action the youth took with Lady Mary. George had done it to take special care of the old doll that had meant so much to his granny. But it looked like something else entirely.

Jonah shook his head. "Oh, c'mon, not the doll …" He frowned in revulsion when George stuck two fingers up and between the beauty's milky smooth glass thighs. He looked at the doll's lifelike face and for some reason he couldn't get the thought out of his head that there was a pleasurable and embarrassed blush on her cheeks.

"George, c'mon, man!" He winced pleadingly at the weird sight. "What am I going to say to the person that comes in and see's you with your fingers up in a doll like that?!" He flinched the deeper George felt around inside.

The teen huffed with a cold glare. "Tell'em that it's because I'd lose my fingers to frost bite if it was the real one." He replied sarcastically and pushed his hand deeper inside Lady Mary's cavity.

Pushing his knuckles inside her made his friend frown in disgust as he watched. "I literally have access to a staff of pretty English waitresses and cigarette girls who'd leap at a chance for a guy who looks like you to have a hand in them like that … and here we are, your fist up in a doll's … I mean, you know this don't look right, okay? You know it don't!"

"Look, you're not making this any easier!"

"You better just pray that this ain't a Voodoo Doll …"

"Me? Mom better pray this isn't a Voodoo Doll, or she's gonna be walking like a queer ass duck for a month."

"Yeah, that, or she's gonna think the Immaculate Conception was child's play."

"Will you shut the hell up! I'm trying to get us some closure here!"

"That's one way to look at it …"

"…"

"Look, brother, why don't you walk away from the doll. We'll take a chartered plane back to Mississippi, My treat, alright? We can go look up the 'Cotton Queen of Vicksburg' and see what exactly the "Cotton Gin" is … because I guarantee you, it's not half as fucked up as whatever the hell you're doing to poor Little Lady Mary right now."

Suddenly, just in their moment of bickering, George began to extract something from inside the doll. It was a dried up and darkened strap of leather that had stitched runes and African characters still barely visible after a century. Attached to the leather strap was a large and brilliant, blood red, ruby. The moment it hit light, it glimmered and glinted, absorbing all the light in the room and throwing it back out in odd and wondrous shapes. There was not another ruby that was the tribal jewel's equal that existed any longer. It was a lost gem, from a lost mine, and a lost method of craftsmanship. George held it up by the necklace straps and showed it to his friend.

This was what so many tragedies and horrors that haunted both young men had been committed for, an African, royal, ruby necklace.

In the early nineteenth century, an enemy tribe of natives had captured and enslaved an African Princess. They were given a fortune by other African slave traders, who, then, sold her in New Orleans. On the very slave auction block where many men salivated to buy the beauty for their own greed and needs, she was purchased by a Virginia Military Institute Cadet, visiting home for Christmas. Upon his arrival at Amantha, the young man set her free and gave her a job in his father's home. As she worked, saving up for the trip back home, slowly she fell in love with the young hero as he was smitten from the moment he saw her. But their love was doomed by race, circumstance, and the laws of the land. As an act of selflessness, he spent all of his savings to return her to her family in Africa. As a token of appreciation of an African King, and the everlasting symbol of their love, the tribe awarded the young officer their most precious gem, a great ruby. It was a prize worth an emperor's fortune both in money and in spirituality for those who believed in such things. But he swore he'd never sell it, nor part from it. And years later, hearing of his death upon the ramparts of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico, the princess returned to Amantha to view the body. There she died upon kissing him farewell. As requested by his father, the son of the officer, made special arrangements, giving this beautiful stranger a royal burial in the family crypt. There, forever around her neck would be the ruby necklace as symbol of the most forbidden and passionate of loves on earth.

That man's granddaughter thought it a good fairytale. But in 1929, when the Wall Street boys were jumping out windows, who the hell had time for fairytales? After all, Martha was her Southern Belle mother's pragmatist. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum would pay George, Sybbie, and their grandchildren large installments of a fortune for the next hundred years just to have it in their collection. However, it never dawned on Martha Levinson, while she left clues to the family treasure, that George would rally a group of rebels to challenge the cultist and his Klan allies in a guerrilla war just to avenge her. If only she had been alive to see it …

She'd think George an over sentimental idiot, who, unfortunately, inherited more than just her, soft headed, disappointment of a daughter's looks.

The teenager, as promised downstairs, tossed over the ruby with ease. The action showed one's age, at the complete lack of respect that was placed on the sacred gem. Jonah caught the underhand toss and choked down on the old leather till he held the ruby in the palm of his hand. There was something bafflingly beautiful, radiant, and powerful about it. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but when he had it in his possession he felt his mind gain a clairvoyant focus. If he concentrated he felt he could … do anything.

"There she is …" George leaned back in his seat and pointed a finger with a cool ease as he put his feet up again. "What that bastard killed so many people for, "The Lioness's Heart". It was cut from the stomach of a Hausa Witch when she turned, the legendary tribal hero, T-Chala's lover into a lioness and absorbed her humanity into a ruby which she then swallowed. This woman and T-Chala's love was so great that her spirit was too bright, their bond too powerful. The Hausa begged him to cut her spirit out of her. So, whoever possesses it, wields the power of true love, or so those Hausa scorpion worshippers down in the French Quarter believe at any rate." George lifted an eyebrow.

"Like Fairy Tale, True Love's kiss, kind of stuff?" The young club owner asked, his eyes never leaving the jewel in his palm.

George tilted his head. "Maybe …" He shrugged a shoulder. "They say if you love someone hard enough and you make a wish, they'll come to you." He lifted his eyebrows with a sigh.

Jonah held the jewel up by forefinger and thumb to the light. Looking through it he saw the world through a prism of hazy mist and light. But hearing George's story, he paused a moment in sudden thought. "How long do you think this thing had been in the doll?" He asked.

"Couldn't say …" George grunted as he reached over and picked up Little Lady Mary. He studied her face, his hand absently, without thought, stroking her hair lovingly. The connection between the rugged young man and the sweet girl it was made for felt in the softness and love he treated the most beloved toy. "Probably long before anyone was looking for it." he surmised. But eventually he thought about it as well. He felt the emptiness of the doll, the returning of the toy being a lifeless object, rather than surrounded by an aura, when the necklace was inside. He studied the doll's beautiful face and began to wonder. It was the story about Cora Levinson on her wedding night and the lore of making a wish of love …

"She used to love this thing …" George said quietly. There was a fearful suspicion that he couldn't believe he might be entertaining based on nasty rumors and old jealousies in Newport Ballrooms many years ago. It couldn't be possible that his mother was conceived based on a childish wish of …

When his friend gave a sigh that was coupled with a sober blink, the teenager was grateful for going off track. Jonah looked at the beauty and majesty of the gem, but his awe of it was slowly fading away with the shock of finally seeing what they fought for, finally holding it in his hands. George knew what Jonah was going to say next, because his face was exactly how George felt every time he held the damn thing himself.

"It still not worth it … is it?" Jonah asked knowingly, bitterly tossing the gem with a loud clack. The ruby slid across the wooden desk with a scrape that halted just in front of George.

The teenager picked up the necklace and popped it up in the air and caught it. "Nope …" He shook his head in agreement.

The truth was that the two young men would trade all the riches in the world, forego all the pleasures of success in their endeavors to bring back their fallen friends. No matter the prize, the power, the majesty of the 'X' at the end of the map, it was never going to be worth the lives lost to defend and have it. Five sets of smiles, tears, blood, sweat, and dreams … five children with dreams of a brighter future had been taken away because of the uncontrollable lust for this thing, this one priceless gem.

And they'd never understand nor forgive it for existing.

"What are you gonna do with it?" Jonah asked taking a swig, his jaw set tight. There was a wordless rejection. He knew that George had come here to offer him a cut. But the youth didn't care how much money it was worth, he didn't want any part of that horrible trinket that had taken so much.

"Dunno …" The raven haired teen stared at it. "I thought seriously the other night about chucking it out the plane window. Then, when I was in Liverpool, I might've melted it down at the Iron Works." He shook his head with bitterness. "But … I think I'm just gonna sell it to the London Metro …" He snatched it up in a hard grip. "It's what the old lady wanted in the first place. She might not be happy that'll be in a British Museum, but she can write me a strongly worded letter some other day …" He chuckled in mirth of self-amusement.

"They'll pay you Crawley's a pretty penny for it too." Jonah toasted him. "With that kind of money, you'll be throwing shindigs like Nero at the Abbey eighty years from now …"

The young man paused when he saw the sudden darkening look in his best friend's eyes at the mention of the estate. "What makes you think that?" He asked with rebuke hidden under a sharp snort.

"I thought, you know … you'd put that money with your family." He frowned worriedly.

George nodded, bitterness twisting his features. Something ugly and angry swirled with blackness of resentment and rage that surrounded the boy. "Not on your life, pal." George said with darkness in a gravelly voice. "I'll just tell'em it's bootleggers cash, or something … that outta keep them away." He was distant.

There was something defensive, a deep worry in Jonah's chest, at the way that George clasped the gem. "Listen, man …" He drew out cautiously. "I know how you feel about that thing, trust me … but it isn't just yours, brother. It belongs to Lady Grantham, Lady Edith, Sybbie … your mom. They deserve a say." He tried to make his reason sound less like a demand.

"Why?" George snorted hatefully. "So they can bury it in another tomb? One with priceless paintings, grand staircase, and lavish dinner parties every month? It's not what Granny Levinson wanted in the first place." He shook his head.

"She's dead, man, who the hell cares what she wanted?!" He glared in disbelief.

"I care!" George snapped in sudden rage. "We all nearly died for this damn thing. We lost our friends because of this _fucking_ thing! I'll be dead before I let some unfeeling, vapid, vampire in black form fitting sequence dresses and diamond chokers, squander their sacrifice by throwing another goddamn, gaudy, dinner party to show it off!" George pounded on the desk in a storm of fury.

Jonah's face was made of stone in a study of heavy seriousness and sharp eyes cut from marble. There was a long silence between the two as George looked away in a moment of shame in his loss of temper. With a deep sigh, George made an apologetic hand gesture and nod. With a creak in his seat in the quiet office, he leaned forward.

"I met with a benefactor for the museum, Lord something … Didn't exactly let him in on what I got. But he gave me a tip about some old, ex-pat, who turned on the Ottomans during the Palestine Campaign in 1917. He said that there's something that the _Crusaders_ left behind in _Acre_. It's some Norse thing that Emperor Fredrick "Barbarosa" dropped during the Third Crusade. Saladin hid it in the vaults from The Lionheart before he took the city. Apparently Kaiser Bill and the Germans were looking for it during the war, before the British Army pushed the Turks out and the Germans were recalled to the Western Front to fight the AEF. Now Hitler is trying to make a deal with the Foreign Office to get his men down there to look for it again. But apparently this blind Turk knows where to look, it's just that no one knows where to find him …" George explained with just a hint of intrigue, trying to sell his friend on the story.

"And …" Jonah shrugged, still frowning in confusion.

George leaned back in his seat, examining the gem in hand. "I was just trying to find out how much they'd be willing to hawk for 'the Lioness' and instead 'snuffy' gave me the lead, of all leads." He looked dangerously invested. "It could be the find of the century." He baited.

Jonah nodded with a quirked eyebrow. "If you find the treasure map first." He sipped from his glass. His mind was already going through a Rolodex of contacts.

George smirked easily. "There's not a lot of places that can claim the patronage of a blind Turk, even in this town." He nodded. "If he's blind …" He started.

"He wouldn't break from his routine …" They finished at the same time. Years of friendship and chemistry allotted the privilege of seeing, wordlessly, what was in the other's mind.

George tossed up the necklace and caught it. "It's only up to us to find this London Pub before the Nazi 'Diplomatic attaché' does first." He pointed to Jonah.

The darkly angry young man faded, and for just a moment he sounded like the old George, the one Jonah had known so well. He was a young man that was filled with a strong personality and noble admirability that drew people to him. In times of trouble, in want, and in long odds, he had enough confidence and arrogant swagger that somehow made one believe that you weren't losing … but simply had them where you wanted them. And when he got you through it in one piece, you'd loved him even more. It was that George that could've talked him into one more epic adventure into danger and mystery.

But it wasn't that George he saw.

"What's this ' _us'_ , bullshit?" Jonah asked folding his arms.

Despite a reprieve, the darkness still swirled deep inside and bled through every part of the teenager in front of him. And the shadowy demon deep inside a tormented young man reared its head in a flash of deep blue eyes. "What, in all the high times here, did you forget how we do things?" He frowned. He leaned in closer. "Look, Jonah, I know you got the club, and I'm not asking you to come with me. I just need you to help me out in finding this Turk. You've been here longer than I have, I'm sure you know how to put out the word …" He began.

"Boy …" Jonah shook his head in disbelief. "If there's one unlucky son of a bitch in this entire world who ain't needing to be messing with Turks, it's you. Or have you forgotten how you got that fine leather jacket in the first place? Wasn't off some Ottoman bounty hunter you killed in Fort Worth?" He chastised with a hard glare. "And I wouldn't be mixing it up with Nazi's either." He added on harshly.

George looked darkly amused. "I don't remember you being afraid of some socialist, racist, pieces of shit that dress up in uniformed outfits. Hell, we cleaned 'The Klan' out of New Orleans didn't we?" He asked in challenge.

There was something almost sad in the youth's eyes at his friend's arrogant words. "Where's your head at? I mean, what's wrong with you, boy?! Have you picked up a paper? Those hateful, socialist, crackers in New Orleans might have called me Nigger, they might have strung my ass up for touching a white girl, but they ain't never put a gun to my head. The Klan, they might be dead wrong, they might be ignorant, but they got their reasons. They got a reason why they hate you and me. Those Nazi's, they ain't got no sense, they ain't got no reason but a mad goddamn dog. They gonna kill to kill, George, and they don't even know why, or care! Those Nazis and Hitler, that's a whole different kinda evil all together, miles from any damn, dirt merchant, asshole who dresses up in bed sheets, afraid some black man is gonna take his job." He explained gravely, his eyes focused on the odd, watery, neon shimmers reflected on his desk. There was clairvoyance in his speech, in his mind, like somehow he knew something evil, horrible, indescribable was going on across the channel. It was something they didn't know yet, but knew was happening.

He turned his, worriedly angry, hazel colored eyes to his friend across from him. "But, ya'll don't worry, now …" He mockingly announced. "Cause there ain't nothing to fear now that Captain Buck Rogers is back from the future. He's just gonna fly in on his jet pack and incinerate the Nazi menace for all mankind with his Daddy's ray gun!" The hard glare of disapproval remained chiseled on his face as he gave loud and passive aggressive claps of ovation for the teenager. He clapped and clapped, standing and walking over. He didn't stop till he was applauding right in George's face.

The young man tightened his jaw, ignoring his friend's mockery as he looked out the window. Finally George swatted his hands away from his face. "Fine, suit yourself, Jonah …" he snapped. "I'll do it without you." He dumped his glass on the table.

Suddenly, something akin to a rage of helplessness came over the young owner. He snatched George by his double breasted leather jacket's lapels. He snarled in the boy's, scarred, handsome face. "Don't you walk away from me, boy!" He shook him. "Look at yourself!" He shouted at him.

"Ain't you learned nothin, after all these years?!" He roared. "We starved, we froze, we fried in the hundred degree heat! We survived all that just so that you can go get yourself shot up by Nazis looking for some Goddamn Turk or in the Holy Land shoveling sand and camel shit!" He shook his head, tears in his eyes. "Look around you, damn it, George!" His voice broke. "We got a club, we got somewhere that's ours … OURS!" He put up a fist in between them, trying to show the power of the concept through physicality and passion. His eyes and voice was filled with emotion. "We got our own kitchen, our own food that we don't gotta pay for …" He paused, his lip trembling. "We ain't never starving again, George! You and me, boy, we ain't never gonna know an empty stomach …" His breath shuttered. "After all we've been through, together … man, you can't ever, **never** put a price on that, not ever!" He shook George trying to get him to see the blessings. But he saw only anger, only hatred in his friend's eyes. "You still got a home, you still got a family! You got a Grandpa and a granny, Aunts, Uncles, and a cousin who still love you. You got your grandma Isobel at home whose been waiting for you, waited for eight damn years! You have more than any of us ever had!" tears ran down his face as he tried desperately to get through to his friend, his brother. "And if you can't see that …" He shoved George away. "Then I don't know you … not anymore." He shook his head, eyes watery, sniffing in anger.

George growled. "You don't understand …" He shook his head.

"No, I guess I don't." There was bitterness in the youth's voice at the teen.

It took a moment for the young man to compose himself. "I'm not like you …" He said with anger. "I didn't have a father, he died. I didn't have a mother, she didn't want me, and still doesn't. My family didn't send me away, because, it was the only way for me to get off the farm and make a better life for myself, like yours did. Man, they sent me away, exiled, stranded me in a foreign land! My mother couldn't stand the sight of me! And she made sure that if she didn't want me that no one else could either. They all stood around and let her do it. Those people that you like, that you can't understand why I don't … They left me, Goddamnit! They left me! For eight years, they left me out there, alone! All, because, Queen Mary was and will always be a shit mother!" George snarled hatefully.

"I didn't owe them a damn thing, when Cora died! I didn't owe them a damn thing when I blew those old hags away to hell, or when I gutted that animal in the crypt in New Orleans! … and I sure as hell don't owe them anything now that I'm back!" He declared with a roar, slamming his hand on the desk with a loud smack.

Somewhere that night, a chill ran through Robert Crawley in bed as a voice in his mind and heart echoed with a furious, ghostly, rage _"I won't give him up!"_ The trigger of a past moment in time was unknown, but a feeling of sadness followed when his lordship turned and held his wife reading next to him.

Once again, after all the yelling, the anger, resentment, and memories there was silence. Slowly, Jonah returned to his seat, sinking in defeat inside. It had all touched a nerve of all the bad experiences and suffering that had begotten his life since he could remember. He seemed, on the surface, to have everything he wanted. But he had underestimated the amount of hurt and pain inside George Crawley upon his home coming. Anyone who said that 'you can't always have it all' never ate stew made from pet store goldfish, algae water from a park, and stale bread that was waited on half a day in line for.

Sensing an impassible road covered by dark stormy clouds, George looked for something to say, to do, and to make up for … himself. He knew that after all they had been through, his friend, sworn brother, just wanted everyone to be happy. He didn't know, didn't understand, the teen's aversion, anger toward his family. Lady Edith had been Jonah and the remaining Runaways benefactor. They loved her, and she was kind and helpful to them. She helped them get jobs, boarding, made sure they were provided for and taken care of. Over the years they had become close friends and London companions to both Sybbie and especially Marigold. When Lord and Lady Grantham came to London, they had dined with them at Lady Edith's London House. There was a charm to the Crawley's that outsiders were drawn too, George knew that better than anyone. But there was a history, a past that someone like George, just couldn't get past. People like Charlie and Jonah, they saw an eccentric, but close knit family. But they never felt the things George had, seen the things he had suffered through while these same people looked on and did nothing. They looked on and did and said nothing while he fell in love with God's most perfect creation.

"Nothing makes sense anymore …"

It was all George could find the heart, the words, to utter in response to all that had been said to him. He turned, leaving Little Lady Mary and the priceless Ruby on the desk. He wasn't sure if he was giving them to Jonah to keep or to hold, all he knew was that he couldn't stand to be near them anymore. Quietly he turned to leave.

"Brother …"

He paused at the office door, opening it he heard the roar of the party down below. A saxophone played a bluesy melancholy that swam through his veins. He turned his head to see that Jonah wasn't looking at him, but staring out the window at the neon sign that bared the name of a group of rebels who lived and fought in a simpler time.

War was easier than growing up.

"It's a damn shame about Marigold …" He said with a deep, family like, compassion.

He never said it. He had never brought it up, even at his most desperate. But he knew why George was this way. Jonah knew why the young man was so willing to throw it all away, why he rushed in at New Orleans to fight the most dangerous creature both had ever known, why he was willing to pick a fight with Nazis. Some might have called George cold hearted since Fort Worth, might claim that had they punched him in the heart the ice would break their fist. But in reality, if they were to punch him in the heart, they'd bleed to death on shards of something broken so completely, that it was hard to imagine what it could've ever been in the first place.

"It's a … It's just a damn shame." Jonah bowed his head, his face despairing as it vanished into shadow.

George nodded in acceptance of the one fundamental truth that was killing everything inside him. Without a word, he walked out of the office with a slam of the door.

After descending the stairs, he was, for a long moment, lost in a haze of smoke, jazz, tiaras, sashes, and colorful gowns. His sorrow, his anger, his wounded sense of self made him numbed and unwatchful of the crowded night club filled with smiling faces. They were laughing and merry making, things that seemed so alien to the young man. There were people, some with vaguely familiar faces, some with faces he knew well, once, but couldn't be bothered to identify when they passed him. They didn't know the rugged teen, couldn't, in a million years, believe that this cowboyish American youth was the Viscount of Downton Abbey. But he didn't seem to care either way.

George Crawley was the disguised Odysseus, the no account drifter, returned to a home overrun with suitors.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _Jumper" – Third Eye Blind_

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _Let me take a moment to apologize to the few devoted readers of this story._

 _When I first broke the story for this interlude into the final act I envisioned it being two parts. But then I was kinda bit by an idea that wouldn't leave me alone which is where "New Orleans 1935" comes from. I was still content with a three part interlude. But, then, I completed this latest chapter and it turned into a huge 26K word colossus. And I didn't think it was fair to expect you guys to read another massive chapter. So I've split it into two. The Final Interlude of this will come out next week._

 _I know, I'm probably testing you guy's patience with all these Interlude parts. Believe me, Four Parts, was never in the plan. This Interlude was important for the reason in the symmetry of Past and Present, which will make a lot more sense in the first chapter of the last act. This chapter, in particular, is sort of a bowtie on the New Orleans chapter. In reality I envisioned that what happened in New Orleans was actually George telling Jonah what happened, and originally this chapter was supposed to be a part of last chapter. But the New Orleans chapter got way too big._

 _If you're wondering why I'm putting so much into these flashbacks, it's because of the only bad review this story has gotten. In it, the person had a very hard time buying into a situation in which George was in America for eight years and at war with the Crawley's to a point of being exiled by Mary. So these flashbacks are here to explain the complexity of the conflict, especially these four chapter which completely inform the Prologue. So, if you reread the Prologue after next chapter, it will be a seamless transition._

 _Once again, I'm sorry for the delay on the final chapters of this story. It kinda got away from me._

 _But to quote Dr. Robert Ford._

" _ **You must indulge me in the occasional mistake."**_


	16. Final Interlude: Born a Rebel

**Final Interlude**

 _Born a Rebel_

London 1936

In a crowded nightclub, there was a lull in the party atmosphere that had filled its grand opening. As the late night dragged on, the conversations began to get heavier, and the mood changed. Men and women mingling in their first meetings had now, at this hour, made a deeper connection. It was the end of the preliminaries, those who had found their calling, and those who had come together, now needed a moment to themselves. A real signature on the evening that notarized the coupling of soul mates and lost souls who entered the gilded and shinning Mecca of drinks and jazz.

And as the lights turned down low, a tall, statuesque woman with blond hair, silver gown, and white boa stood at the band stand. All her finery shimmered in the blue floodlights of the stage as she took her spot by the microphone. If "The Jacks" were all the Creole spirit flickering on an open flame, than this Gorgeous woman was the sparkling reflection of the pale moon on a romantic evening. Everything was soft, fine, and thoughtful in her full rounded face as she looked out at the crowded club, the hundred dimmed faces watching her.

She closed her eyes, making an emotional connection to the energy of the room and the expectations of the crowd. She slowly nodded her head as a singular and melancholy horn from the darkness behind her echoed through the club. She allowed the lead in music to bleed past her mark to start. The slow orchestra music hit the right cord of slow, romantic, and maybe just a bit of regret from the people listening, watching, and descending to the dance floor.

In the crowd were lovers, future lovers, spurned hearts, and all of the heart breaks waiting to happen. But the woman at the microphone knew one thing about this job, about this life. Somewhere out there, someone was making a grave mistake. Living a memory that they could never take back in all the unhappy tomorrows that could never live up to having that one someone they shouldn't. Forever someone out there would remember this one moment, with her voice to narrate the doomed requiem of what love truly means.

" _I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz  
When an old friend I happened to see."  
_

As more and more people descended down with their partners the traffic at the bar died down. The neon glow was silhouetted in a hazy cloud of cigarette smoke that danced to the slow orchestra music and vibrated with the passing swish of oxygen and shadows that crossed from couples leaving their drinks to cement their own night's sins. In their wake they left a seemingly lone figure to listen to the music on his own.

The young man looked to have the world on his shoulders in the sweet beauty of pain in the woman's pure voice. His only interaction was with the bartender that didn't look to be a native Englishman by skin color and his understanding of someone in emotional distress, and what they needed. He wordlessly dropped a glass in front of the teen. The single ice cube made a tink noise as it rattled and spun inside. He watched the golden liquid being poured, like a waterfall of relief to a man dying of thirst, dying to forget the desert he had been stranded in. A single waterfall wouldn't save a lost man, but it would help him forget, for just a little while, that there was no escape.

" _I introduced her to my loved one  
And while they were dancing  
My friend stole my sweetheart from me …"_

The teen tossed the older youth a nod of thanks and sucked it down in one knock back. Grunting down the burn in his throat, he welcomed the pulse of numbness that cleared his mind. When he was able to think again, he took a moment to wonder if the man behind the bar knew how old he was. But looking in the mirror behind the shelves of booze, he began to wonder if he'd believe him if he actually told him. It was a question he didn't remember to ask when the barkeep refilled his glass. Sniffing, the young man drank what was poured for him, not asking what it was he was drinking nor needing answers to any questions.

George Crawley had a thirst and a waterfall in the desert.

" _And I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz.  
Now I know just how much I have lost.  
Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing  
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz."_

Somehow, even in his strive to forget his death in this barren land, George still reached into his jacket pocket. It was a small pocket booklet of an artist's rendering of a slim and beautiful ballerina in a pink and silky fairytale cut off dress. She had tight, shiny, stockings on slender legs and pink slippers. Her long tresses of golden hair were drawn so realistic, like you could almost imagine what it was like to run your hand through her luxurious mane. The girl's green eyes were soulful as they stared at you from the production program. She struck a graceful and athletic pose as she was held up by her prince. He was a handsome man with soft features and a slender, bladed, body. He had primmed brown curls, cut perfectly, and stalwart dark eyes. He wore a red double breasted Rococo uniform jacket with brass buttons, but white tights and slippers.

When the pulse of numbness faded away with another nock back, he remembered how accurate the artist had made Sleeping Beauty look. But then there was no sense in trying to edit perfection, was there? As for prince charming, they had shaved away the harshness in his features, muffling the attention of a foreigners face on the London metro's posters of the Season's titular ballet. But there were the little things that the artist missed, like the way Sleeping Beauty moved without any effort or thought. It was as if the music was somehow tailored to her, preformed by subpar dancers for hundreds of years, till the chosen one appeared, till she took the London Theater. The drawing couldn't communicate how frustrated, how overwhelmed, Prince Charming looked when he chased her around the stage. How unable, incapable, he was to put into words how much he couldn't stand her, yet, how much he loved her. His hands wanting to claw her waist when they come together and yet how passionately he wanted this beauty. His hard, Russian, sensibilities pushed against the gentleness of handling this perfect rose he covets like his favorite work of art.

The artist would never be able to capture the singular look this, perfect, ballerina had when her passionate and lovelorn eyes drifted backstage as the prince grasped her slender waist tightly, bodies moving to the choreography of staged true love. Never reproduce the look that came over her when she saw a rugged figure watching her from behind the curtain. She saw someone that shouldn't have been there, a ghost of the past that should never have come in the first place. It caused her foot to slip. But she was saved by her Russian rival, her worshiping admirer, who caught what an enthralled audience missed. From there, the rest of her performance was flawless, energized, and filled with a wildness of emotions. She wasn't dancing for herself. She wasn't dancing for the prince, for the high born crowd in the heat of the London season, or for her family who had box seats to the performance of a lifetime. She was dancing from the memories of a heart she used to have, used to share with this underdressed young man who shouldn't have been there. She danced in the interpretation of emotions and feelings that were so intimate to her, that it was but a muscle's memory of extension and flexing in her feet. Possessed by the pain of a brighter yesterday that never came, showing it to the world, and how they all loved every moment of her heartache.

The only thing the artist could ever recreate with such vibrancy was the way the crowd cheered at the end. How they tossed roses down and up to her. How much they all loved her, admired, and was taken by her abilities with slippers on her feet, music in her motion, and love … love for a drifter that had no name. A nameless drifter who placed his hands in his leather jacket pockets and sank away to the shadows as the Russian dancer, a prince in every way to the eye, took the beauty in his arms and kissed her as the bulbs flashed and the audience roared in approval.

She might have looked for him when it was over, might have asked if he was with the family, but they'd be surprised by the question. George had spent the better part of the day checking up on everyone, all of them not even knowing that he was standing right next to them. It was selfish of him to think so, and he knew it, but it hurt to note that they had, indeed, a life of their own. People he thought about every once in a while, people he loved since he could remember, they all had a life. It seemed since he had been gone, everyone had moved on without him. Set up lives and careers, gained friends, or indulged in a guilty pleasure without giving a thought of where George might have been or if he was even alive. In truth, he knew that if Marigold was to ask if he was there while she was dancing, his own family would've been more surprised if she asked if a ghost had appeared on stage.

George Crawley might as well have been dead for all his family knew … or cared.

The heartbroken young man decided to put away the booklet. Folding it up, he looked around at the parties at the tables, smiling, laughing, and being the fake snobs he had known them all to be. As he knocked back another, his final thought was how many people here couldn't stand one another and still came together anyway. They'd take their issues out in the beds of the other's spouse. He gave a cynical grunt at the fleeting thought as he embraced the lingering emptiness in his mind. When he opened his eyes, giving a sigh, he stared out at the tables, his consciousness crawling back like a boxer beating the count, not knowing when he was whipped. His whole mind seemed to focus on a woman in particular, as if it was conditioned to find her at all times, a hound with a familiar scent. In a crowded room she seemed to stick out to him, picked out by pure instinct built into his DNA.

She was smiling at something, the whole table of painfully familiar faces laughing at whatever had been said. She looked sad, even with all the witty comments flying from the party she was seated with. Her mind seemed troubled tonight. George could feel it within him, just by looking at her. Some sneaking suspicion, something unsaid that tormented her. As if she could feel his stare, feel the young man within close proximity, she turned her head and searched the room till she met his gaze. George wanted to look away, to get up and leave. But it had been so long … so long since he had last laid eyes on her.

Even with the same old resting face of frigid contempt, it was remarkable how she really hadn't aged a day since he could remember. The woman wore a blood red silk dress, outlined in black. A jet choker was fit over her supple pale neck. Her Lady's Maid had really outdone herself, curling and cultivating the body of her mistress's sleek, shimmering hair. Her tumbling fringes giving a mysterious and to-die-for peekaboo look next to her right eye.

Lady Mary Crawley looked like she had just come off a Hollywood movie screen.

For the first time in eight years mother and son locked eyes across the room. George wasn't aware of the way he was looking at his mother, but it must have been a betrayal of everything he had felt all those years. Lady Mary's gaze was always aloof and snobbish, forever questioning if she should even deal with the likes of … anyone. But when she saw the way the young man was watching her, the cold rapier of wit and distain seemed to be sheathed. For the first time since George could remember he saw her red eyes soften, and a sad wilting smile touched her glossy ruby lips in his gaze. For just a moment the dark clouds over an angry young man broke and a slivered sunbeam touched the shadows. But it wasn't till she lifted her Champagne glass in toast to him that he was dumped back into reality. Suddenly feeling a dozen eyes from the table fall on him, trying to get a good look at Lady Mary's young suitor, he sobered up. He quickly turned away with a grunt of self-chastisement for being stupid.

"Just what I needed." He muttered with a sarcastic growl.

George was at his worst since New York, and the last thing he wanted was for people he didn't want to see right now, to be part of any equation in which they recognized him. He hunched over his drink and tried hard to push away thoughts of his mother. Push away the feeling, the compulsion to hug her, to run into her arms, and hide from the world that had beaten him down. He tried to remind himself that was never going to be his mother … that it was never his mother. Even before Cora, Mary's concern was for a future Earl of Grantham when he came to age, her heir. It was never for a small boy who was afraid of the dark, who was lonely, that was Thomas Anna and Bates's concern, in extreme cases Lady Grantham's, but not his Mama's. Knowing his mother, she would hardly believe half of the things he had gone through; much less give him comfort in her arms. Yet, there was still a part of him, a small boy who still lingered in his heart, who still held out hope that one day she would be the mama he needed.

But he drowned out that voice with another shot of liquor, hoping this one would knock him out.

"Sherry …"

When he recovered, someone had said something to him. He felt a slender and soft figure standing over his left shoulder, a tight belly pressed against it. He wasn't interested in company.

"George" He grumbled in introduction without looking.

"What?" She asked.

"What …?" He sighed in annoyance and turned. He suddenly found that he was staring into his mother's silky bust. He looked up and saw that Lady Mary was watching him. Her hands were clasped together in front of her. They met eyes again as she patiently waited for him to say something. George came to eye level to Mary's breasts again, before he scoffed in annoyance and disgust. He turned back to the bar and refused to acknowledge her.

"My …" She said with cold amusement. "I don't get very many men give me that kind of response." She was good at hiding when she had been insulted. He thought she'd walk away, but instead she lingered in his personal space.

"I believe you said something?" She asked.

"My name …" He responded.

"And why on earth would you give me that?" She pondered.

"Cause you came up to me and said "Sherry" and I thought you were introducing yourself."

"Oh, but my name is not Sherry …" Mary shrugged.

"Yeah, no shit." George replied harshly still not looking at her.

There was a glare on the beautiful, cold, face at the profanity sent at her. It seemed strange, but no one had ever cursed at her before, no one but Edith, once. And though she'd admit she might have deserved it that time, it still bothered her till this day. It simply wasn't how it was done where they lived and it wasn't who they were.

No one would dare.

"How'd you find me?" George asked in annoyance.

Mary continued to stare at him curiously. "Well, you jolly well didn't do a very good job of being subtle." She commented with a quirked eyebrow.

"When you're right, you're right." He folded his arms on the bar and looked anywhere but the reflection of the beauty breathing on his curls.

There was a long silence, before Mary decided to stride next to him. George had been looking away, when she decided to go where his eyesight was and drop in the seat next to him. "That's always nice to hear." She made herself at home in the teen's personal space. George scoffed in annoyance.

"Sherry …" She said again, her face seemingly amused.

"That's not your name." George rolled his eyes.

"Oh, it's not, but I'd like one."

"Yeah …? Well, try Fleet Street. I'm sure you could pay a nice girl to be any Sherry you want her to be." George said dismissively.

Mary shook her head. "Well, aren't we salty tonight? If you talk to every woman like this, I dare say, I can't imagine how your mother must take it." She pushed.

It was becoming clear that George wasn't in the mood for games. He finally turned to his mother, anger in his very being as he met her red eyes. "What do you want?" He asked clearly and coldly.

"I walked over for a Sherry, which I must inform you is a drink, and I was wondering if you might order it for me." If Lady Mary noticed that George was furious, she didn't seem to show it.

"What did your tongue fall out? Did you go blind? Order it yourself!" He mocked her in irritation before dismissing her again. It only rubbed salt in the wound when the bartender reloaded the teenager, and the ruby and white beauty, sitting cross legged and regal in the bar seat, said nothing as he left.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" George was outraged.

The glamorous woman was checking herself in the bar mirror. "I'm a Lady …" she began playing with her glossy fringe nearly hiding her eye.

"Yeah? Well, that remains to be seen." George cut her off snidely with a scoff.

Mary rolled her eyes. "Mm …" She ignored his insult. "And Lady's don't order their drinks." She claimed with a tilt of her head with a sense of privileged superiority of an upper societal better.

George glared. "What …?" He snorted. "That's not a thing." He shook his head in offense.

"I'm afraid that is just the way it is." She shrugged. "I'm sorry, but I don't make the rules." She grinned charmingly.

"Really …? Cause that sounds pretty made up to me." The teen countered.

The woman seemed about as annoyed as she was amused by the young man who was fighting a gorgeous woman like herself every step of the way. "Yes, well …" She said coldly. "You're an American, you don't understand these things." There was a snobbish tone in her polished voice as she slightly shook her head condescendingly.

There was something annoyed and angry in George at the idea that not only had his mother not changed physically in sixteen years, but she was still the effete snob he had left behind many years ago. He watched her with a glare, spinning his drink, the ice clinking against the glass.

"If you mean, I don't understand, than yes. And if you mean being American as always being able to see through your bullshit, than yes, I don't understand these things because of my "Americaness" as you put it." He downed his drink.

Once again he was irritated that his sobriety had clawed back up, when he still could count to fifty and Lady Mary was still in his personal space. But this time she looked almost mortified. As if somewhere between the insult and the drink something important had dawned on her.

"I must give you my deepest apology." She played with her choker, as she stared deeply into his eyes.

George snorted, putting the glass down. "That'll be a first." He muttered.

"I'm sorry …" She shook her head, her eyes captured by his. "Have we met?" She asked.

There was nothing but mirth in the young man's laugh, his jaw set, his temper ready to be lost. He didn't know when his mother developed a sense of humor, but it sure as hell wasn't damn funny at the moment. But when he was ready to explode on her, he saw it. There was nothing but cordial sincerity in her velvet voice and red tinted eyes.

"You're serious?" He asked in shocked surprise.

Mary looked apologetic. "I'm sorry, it's loud in here, the music, the people … I just came from my niece's performance at the Met she was …" She explained.

"Sleeping Beauty." George's anger faded and there was a distant sadness in his quieting voice as he looked at his mother, trying hard to hide the hurt she was dealing out.

"Yes, of course." Mary smiled the same smile Violet Crawley taught her when she was a little girl. When she shook her head with that same smile, not only did George know it was faked, but that she was humoring him.

Lady Mary Crawley, after eight years, didn't even know her own son sitting next to her.

There was just about anything that George would rather be doing, anywhere else in the world he'd rather be, than there. He'd go through fighting the Klan again, he'd shiver his way through the Rocky Mountain nights, and he'd even kill those Knickerbocker hags all over again. Anything and anywhere in his most painful moments in his life would be better than the deep wound that he felt knife through him. It was one thing for his mother not to care, it was another to confront the truth that she had completely forgotten about him, written her own son off to the point of not existing. George was starting to feel that maybe he should've done everyone a favor and never came back at all. It would've made everything less complicated for everyone.

"Oh, now I've offended you?" Mary sounded artificially concerned, affected only in the social offense when she saw the shadowy eyes fill with a deep dejection. The business woman looked cornered and mortified when George looked up.

"Don't worry about it …" There was numbness to his dark gravelly voice. "It was a long time ago." He assured her. "I hardly remembered you, myself … but you've just jogged my memory about who you _really_ are." He was bitterly sincere. When the bartender came back, George even ordered the Sherry for her.

There was an uneasy smile on the woman's face. "Thank you …" She gave a sigh of relief. "And thank you for forgiving my slip up. I meet so many new people these days. I hardly remember my own papa's name before luncheon." There was something charming in the hopeful smile she gave this handsome stranger.

George smirked in a front for a figure filled with an abyss of sorrow as he looked away. As she was served her drink, Mary gave it a sip and studied her companion. Her eyes lightened the longer she looked at him. The woman had not become so senseless and absorbed within herself that she couldn't feel the sadness that clouded everything about this dashing young man. It was best in these situations to get up and leave. But she couldn't find the strength to leave the stranger like this. It was in the way he had stared at her from across the room that drew her toward him. After all these years in her loneness, there had only been one person in her life who had ever looked at her the way that this young man had. There was no lust, no preconceived notions of a partnership or coupling to consolidate power. It was a look of nothing but pure love, not for her position, or her fortune. It was just love for her alone. It made her feel like she was standing in the library of Downton, her hand being held in the private talks of breaking an entail and her worth in the world. It made her feel like she was on the beach of the salty sea, a man so tormented, so filled with longing, and all of it for her. She had never felt more wanted, never felt more worthy of existing than in her beloved Matthew's gaze. And when this young man saw her from across the room, and looked at her in the most painfully familiar way, she simply couldn't ignore it.

His love called to her.

"I have a confession." She announced when she was done sipping from her tiny coned glass. "I ordered the Sherry so I could come to talk to you." She admitted.

George was about to take a drink when he paused, staring at the liquor, before he just put the glass down in defeat. "Yeah …?" he said in disinterest.

Biting her lip, she shrugged and tilted her head. "I know it might be unconventional for a Lady to admit it, you might think it too forward, even for the 30's." She led on trying to capture his attention again.

"You might have to break out the smelling salts, I'm so shocked." There was a deep laconic sarcasm to the youth's dismissive and uninterested voice.

A sting of flippancy was portrayed in Mary's expressive eyebrows. "My, you're a tough nut to crack when you're jilted, aren't you?" She said in displeasure, sipping her Sherry.

She felt like she knew how to talk to this one. It was an old dance that she knew the steps too. Her mouth would get her in trouble and then she'd ease the wounds they inflicted with her own sweet and charming medicine. She found herself sharp and impulsive with gab when she found she liked someone, it flustered her. This young man had shown her what he felt about her and now, much like she might have done, he was pushing back too hard.

They both were afraid of being too predictable.

When George didn't respond, she sighed and changed course. "So, you're American … my Mama is American." She stated.

"You don't say?" He muttered sarcastically.

Mary leaned in closer. "Come now … I thought that was a good transition." She flirtily grinned through another modest sip. But the young man only seemed to be in more pain the more she talked. Everything in her social driven mind read the signs of needing to leave someone alone. But the human side of her, however modest she would admit, was concerned for the handsome adventurer. She still felt like she was on the sunset shores of Brighton. Then, she had held back, conflicted and angry about her life and her own stupid decisions. But when she'd think back to that one magical moment, with the love of her life, now that he had been gone these last sixteen years, Mary thought about what she could've done differently.

That was why she reached out and placed a black silken glove over the young man's hand in comfort.

It caused George to look up at her. She smiled at him encouragingly. She knew that an Englishman would've fled by now, but she noted that American men were made of sterner stuff when it came to women being forward. When George didn't answer, he felt her take his hand in hers. Slowly, he turned to find a look of warning with raised eyebrows that it was only going to escalate if he didn't talk to her.

George finally relented with a sigh. "Newport via New Orleans …" He said side eyeing her. "It's where I was before here." He replied.

Elated that she was getting through to him, Mary perked up. "I have been to Newport, I used to bicycle with my Mama and sisters down to the beach for picnic luncheons. My Grandmamma used to host the most lavish parties you've never seen before. She had a palace by the sea."

For a moment, her line was cast into a time passage of teenage hood. She could still feel the wind in her hair, the sounds of nature around her, and the warmth on her skin as she peddled with her family. Papa shouting at her not to get too far ahead, Mama trying desperately to keep Edith upright, while Sybil circled the two of them like a swan on wheels, making helpful suggestions to their dirt stained sister on how to stay on her bike.

"Not anymore …" George broke her from her revelry staring into his filled glass.

She looked up in surprise for a moment, before rationalizing his statement. "Yes, well, I guess this horrible 'Depression' had closed it down for good. There was some talk about maybe reopening it. But I guess that's not going to happen now. I suppose, since you were there, you heard of what happened to Levinson Manor?" She asked.

Suddenly George looked guilty as he cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. "It got blown up." He nodded, avoiding his mother's eyes.

The young man was starting to wonder if they'd start calling him the 'Levinson demolisher', because, somehow, George had become, at least, partially responsible for the destruction of most of his Great-Grandmother's estates. San Sochi had been burned down by Pinkertons. Amantha had been invaded and trashed twice by the Klu Klux Klan, been the site of a small battle, and was now left to abandoned ruin in the bayou and woods outside of New Orleans. And now Levinson Manor was blown to shreds when George rigged the ancient furnace. The manor was blown apart in a concussive explosion that could be heard, felt, and seen for miles, with most of the Pinkerton thugs inside. George's only regret was that he could not save his Granny's girlhood processions and that he hadn't gotten Alemdar Pamuk who waited for him elsewhere, sensing George's trap.

Mary watched in momentary fascination while George rubbed the stinging gash on the bridge of his nose. It was a scar given to him by a bastard son of a Princess of Monaco and her Royal Ottoman rapist. It would be any time now that the British Newspapers would pick up the picture of two men crossing blades on top of the old commuter train that rolled through the heart of Newport. One clashing with a father's curved sword cane the other with a British Officer's saber that once belonged to Robert Crawley and mounted on a mother-in-law's mantle for prestige in case of important company.

"It's been hard on poor mama the most of all. It seemed every month she reads some horrid article in American newspapers about someone she had come out with, losing their fortune, or their home being foreclosed upon, or killing themselves. And worst, being arrested for doing … well, vile things for money. But when she heard that Levinson Manor was mostly floating away into the Atlantic I thought it would be the end of her for sure. It seems now that all of her childhood homes are no more." Mary sounded sympathetic. The woman could be cold and snooty to almost anyone in the world, but she loved her mama so. And could never bring herself to make light of her suffering.

"She's lost everything she's ever known." George hid his face in a palm. There had never been more shame in the world than there was right now inside him. His Granny suffered the loss of so much, and he couldn't deny that it had been all his fault.

"To loose one's childhood home …" Mary shook her head. "I've come close once or twice, but I still couldn't imagine loosing mine, could you?" She asked.

The teen rubbed his chin remorsefully. "Couldn't say …" the young man replied almost bitterly. "I wouldn't know what one felt like." He swirled his drink, watching the last of his ice cube melt inside. For some reason Mary felt that there was an accusatory barb toward her in the statement.

"Well from your look, I expect an adventurer like you was born for that sort of life?" She prodded for more information in her fascination with his scars that she was adverse in asking about. It was not socially proper.

George watched her hand holding his. "No … not really." He spoke quietly.

He remembered the basement in Downton. It was the day he had found the mysterious stuffed Great Dame that was still in his inner pocket. He remembered putting on his father's uniform and his Aunt Sybil's headscarf. But most of all, he remembered is mom holding him, telling him how sorry she was for forgetting him. When he thought of a childhood home, he thought of that day with Anna and the trunks.

It was the last time his mother had ever hugged him.

Little did he know, his private revelry on his handsome face was drawing Mary closer to him with his love stricken eyes and broken heart. A sudden guilt, a fire to make that sad look go away, to repent for whatever sin had been done to this fine young man, tormented Mary. She reached out to cup his cheek, without thinking, but George turned away. Suddenly, both realized just how heavy the emotions were between them. George waited for Mary to apologize, to release his hand. To do what was socially acceptable.

But she only gripped him tighter.

God help her, it was darling Matthew come again. It simply had to be. She felt insane, she felt like they'd lock her up for uttering the truths carved into her heart. It was the way he looked at her, the way she loved him so much, so suddenly. It couldn't have been anyone else, it couldn't be anyone but Matthew who could make her feel this strongly so quickly. A touch of the hand in a private conversation and she was filled to the brim of her soul with an old and true love.

Mary's red eyes were burning a hole through George as he tried to collect himself. He wanted to hold her, wanted to love her desperately. He wanted what every child wanted at some point in their life from a parent. After ten years, he just wanted his mother to hold him, to tell him it would be alright. He just wanted to feel safe again, to not have to defend himself, to sleep with a hand on a knife and a revolver within reaching distance. But he couldn't have it, couldn't tell her who he was. His mother was looking at him the way she was, because, she didn't know who he was. The moment she found out it was George, everything that went bad between them, his failure to save Cora, it would ruin the moment. It would ruin this illusion of what his life could've been if he had just been fast enough on that fateful Christmas morning.

Feeling an overwhelming emotion that he couldn't control, he looked for any comfort he could. It was why he reached for his good luck charm. The old Great Dame felt soft in his hand as he held it tightly. He knew it must have looked childish, but he didn't care. There was something calming with it in his grip. He looked down at the mystery toy that he didn't know anything about.

The moment she saw it, Lady Mary looked stricken, as if she had been slapped in the face. "Where did you get that?!" She reached for the dog immediately. George moved it away from her grip with a defensive glare.

He always assumed that it belonged to his father, some good luck charm that someone gave him according to his Grams. But he was surprised to see how hurt, how every icicle, every defense inside Lady Mary had melted away. She was all emotion in sight of the little animal.

"How did you come by that?!" She demanded throwing herself against George in protest and mystery. She was nearly on top of the young man, noses inches apart her breath stinging his cheeks in their struggle. "How …" She halted her protest when she was stonewalled by blue eyes. It was only then that she pulled it all together, why she felt the way she did, how he got ahold of the stuffed dog. The dashing young man that she was so deeply in love with was who he had always been.

He was one part beloved Matthew, and one part darling Sybil.

He wasn't blond anymore. He wasn't his father's son in one glance as he once was. He was all Levinson now. He had Mama's coloring and accent, and Sybil's look. But that didn't matter. It didn't matter at all, because, he was still as beautiful as when she first met him. He was just as perfect as the day Matthew had held him for the first time. But he was different now, he was injured, wounded, hurt in ways beyond the scars visible … and it was all her fault.

"My dearest darling …?" She whispered with a cracked voice of a hundred emotions, her hand cupping his cheek with a deep love. George was caught up in the ghost of yesterday, a time that seemed like another life. He turned in her grip and kissed her covered palm, burying his face into his mother's saintly touch. He was like a wayward dog reuniting with his beloved partner after so long apart.

And it had been so long …

"Mary, there you are!"

The two's emotional reunion, the compulsion to come together was dowsed by an accented voice polished so vigorously that it practically sparkled when it left his mouth. He was a man of medium height, with whitened teeth that shined in the light. He was handsome to a fault, his blond hair parted on the side and waved just right. He was a beautifully glamorous man in his spotless tuxedo and command of the room. If it wasn't his handsome face that drew attention, it was that nagging sensation of seeing him somewhere before. The movie star was a perfect fit to the beautiful woman sitting at the bar.

There were a shining Hollywood couple.

Roger Sinclair jogged up to the bar. Immediately, the woman ripped away her loving hand from her son's buried face, using her black silk gloved digits to wipe away tears from her eyes. George remained silent, a look of dejection on his face at the scolded cat reaction that Mary had to being caught so intimately close to him. From the way his mother put distance between her and himself, one might have thought that Sinclair walked in on George's hand up her skirt and between her silky thighs digging for a ruby necklace.

The glamorous woman gave one last wipe of her eyes, before she turned to the man and gave a pleasant, practiced smile. "Hello Darling." She walked over and gave him an affectionate peck on the side of the lips. When George saw it, he rotated his open jaw and nodded grudgingly as he looked away.

Of course his mother was dating Roger Sinclair. That was what Roman had been hinting at when George first arrived.

"How you doin, fella …" Sinclair greeted George with a condescending pat on his leather clad shoulder. The man spoke with an easy going and smooth Trans-Atlantic voice that could claim either Belgrave Square or Fifth Avenue depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on. It only pissed George off more.

"Kissing your steady girl's hand … fella." George replied stiffly with an arrogant bite in his voice as he volleyed back in intentional goading.

When the sound of something brittle cracking echoed, no one was sure if it was a glass or Roger Sinclair's face. His teeth chattered a little as there was a touch of grimness to his leading man chompers on display. It took the teenager all of two seconds to know that he must have been watching them the whole time. It might have been jealousy, or it might have been fear for his career that brought him over. From a distance, with the look in his girl's eye, it must have seemed like a teenage kid was about to sweep the ravishing Lady Mary off her feet and back to his hotel room for the night. The complete misconstrued intentions and situation gave George a private smirk.

It was very telling of where the movie star's priorities and his mind were tonight.

"Look, pal …" George turned. "No offense, but me and the lady were discussing something important here." The teen jabbed a thumb between himself and his mother.

For just a moment, beyond any hope, there had been a chance to find some footing for reconciliation. And now he was dealing with some 'boyfriend' that, for some reason, thought that Lady Mary Crawley, of all people, was about to run off with a kid for the night. It made him wonder, even if on first contact, why an adult having sex with a teenager was the first thing Sinclair's mind went too.

Mary made a breathy chuckle of charm and complete damage control at the bluntness of George's comment. "Oh …" She twisted. "This is Roger Sinclair, my fiancé." She introduced him cordially. Despite taking an immediate dislike of the raven haired youth, he still shook the rugged teen's hand.

"Yeah, that, uh, King Arthur picture … RKO?" George humored aloofly on purpose.

"MGM …" Sinclair nodded, happy that his fame had a factor in the meeting. "You enjoyed the picture, kid?" He was talking to George differently, knowing now that he wasn't dealing with an Englishman, but a transplanted American who probably snuck in to a joint like this.

"Parts …" The teen answered shortly.

"Oh yeah …" Sinclair was starting to get bored with the meet and greet. "Which ones?" He asked with fake interest.

"The cartoon." He acknowledged with a slight jerked nod, cutting the actor to his bone with his answer. "Now, uh, if you don't mind, Lady Mary and I were talking about something important." He dismissed him with annoyance.

Looking down at her feet, Mary glared and turned it on George. "Darling …" She grasped Roger's arm. "If you can give me just five minutes." She was apologetic with him, but behind the ever pleasant chill, was something tired and annoyed with the man.

Much like George, Mary also knew that he had come over out of some fear of being made to look the fool by the queen of making dapper men look the fool. This was not the first time that he had intervened in a private conversation of hers. She put up with it in Hollywood, because he told her that he was protecting her from vultures at all the parties that could get you to sign away your soul with a wink and quill. And she was grateful then. But now that they were in her world, in her arena of expertise, she was beginning to wonder if he was just trying to control her. Or worse, he was petrified she'd air some dark secret that someone had told her and would ruin him.

She can tell that Sybbie had wanted to tell her something the other day. Her beautiful girl had been so hostile to her lately. Roger said that he'd talk to her, and after that night, the girl hadn't been herself. She looked so guilty, so sad … Mary had wanted to drop him, but it was Sybbie who passionately and angrily berated her till she changed her mind. And yet for all of it, she still wouldn't say what was bothering her. It occurred to Mary that her darling girl knew something, some dark secret that the two were keeping from her.

But what dark secret?

"Oh but, Sweetheart, the table is missing you. I think you could really help. Carole is really hammering your sister about her editorial this week …" He chuckled. "And I don't think it's fair that they all gang up on her." He was sympathetic, George would give him that. "I really think you should come back." He insisted.

"Carole … as in Carole Lombard?" George asked.

"Amazing, isn't it?"

"Sure, especially if she's walking into a place with this temperature. Any hotter and her drawn on eyebrows will melt right off her face. Tell me, if you surprise her, does she look the same no matter what?" He asked with a razor sharp mockery.

Mary had the decency to cover her smile with her hand as her fiancé ignored George. "Really …?" He gave her a disbelieving and annoyed look.

Roger Sinclair liked Lady Mary Crawley for precisely the reason that she was ignoring right now. The cold beauty didn't talk to anyone lower than her station if she didn't have too, and she was a master at balancing conversation with appearance at each glamorous table and posh group they went from. She was the perfect society wife for a man entering the golden age of golden screens and gilded glamour. But a wandering adventurer like George was not someone in a thousand years he'd thought he'd have to compete against for Mary's attention.

There was something contrarian and angry in her red eyes. "If you come to me to defend Edith from Movie Stars, I dare say you're barking up the wrong tree." She turned. "Go find Tom or Rose. Now if you'll excuse me." She walked back to her son.

Roger looked slightly embarrassed at the sly eyes of the bar crowd that was watching 'without' watching the couple have their polite dust up. He cleared his throat. "Now, Sweetheart …" He took a step in pursuit of his fiancé.

"Hey!" George said loud enough to cause the conversations at the bar go quiet. "The Lady told you once, and now I'm tellin'ya … go take a hike. Don't you have a picture of Himmler to kiss or something? You Nazi shyster." There was something dangerous in the younger man's voice.

At the outing of his personal beliefs, Sinclair tugged on his bowtie. If he were in Hollywood, he might have been through if the accusation stuck. In a business of entertainment owned and produced mostly by Jewish gatekeepers, just the stench of Nazism would fumigate a career before it even began. However, as he looked around at the staring Peers of the Aristocracy, he clearly didn't know his audience.

Fore in the private dining and drawing rooms of their 'club members only' hunts, shoots, and dinners half, if not even most, of the Peerage were actual admirers of the National Socialists and their build up on the world stage. It was, after all, in the waning days of Victoria and the glory days of Edward that the British Aristocracy and their Intellectual, collegian, relatives in Oxford Yard first came up with the ideas. Sciences of eugenics, identity politics, and social engineering which were now the corner stones of the German's new, glorious, national socialist society were all born in turn of the century English Country Estate dining rooms.

So, it was, unaware to himself, that the British Peers saw the 'fist in the air' Anti-Nazi George Crawley as the real villain and traitor.

But, while with the unknown advantage over his opponent, Roger Sinclair did not want to live in England again. He had spent too much time, too many years, beating the British out of himself. He had tried so hard to sound and act like an American, born on the right side of the Hudson. He was on the cusp of his great break out. And he wasn't about to let some, rail riding, punk kid, upend his career.

He strode forward in embarrassed anger at George's mockery, but more at Mary who was not only allowing this to continue, but to even expose him to this level of unpleasantness. "Mary, let's go …" He separated the two by standing between them.

The woman seemed surprised that he was even still there. "No." She said firmly. "I have pressing business, and I don't believe I'll be back till the morning." She replied.

"You're leaving with him?!" He snarled in disbelief.

"Oh …" Mary exclaimed coldly. "I don't believe that is any of your business." She turned toward the bar, giving him the cold shoulder.

Sinclair looked furious, the temper breeching his fair façade. "Enough with this foolishness, you will get up and come with me this instant or …"

THUNK!

"Or what?!"

With a ring of metal on leather, George drew the silvery blade of his Apache knife. Twirling the handle through his fingers expertly, he slammed it down hard on the countertop. Feeling the frozen chill of the Spanish steel, Roger turned back with wide eyes and a shocked face. The blade was embedded into the hardwood of the black counter right in the narrowly tight spaces between Sinclair's fore and middle fingers. The boy was still leaning hard on the knife as he looked his mother's fiancé right in the eye without blinking. With just one slip the famous actor could lose one or two of his fingers, or he could be gutted up to the knuckles.

"Get. Lost." George said in a slow gravelly voice that had real threat.

The man whirled in captivity of maiming to his fiancé. Lady Mary's eyes were wide, her eyebrows at her hairline. But there was a clear lack of protest or show of displeasure at the situation. There was no fundamental disagreement from the pallid beauty with the youngest Crawley about where they wanted him to be. There was just shock that this was something that her child, Matthew's child, was capable of.

"Are we at an understanding, shit-bird?" George asked Sinclair condescendingly.

The man was surrounded by a host of shocked and frightened looks, all of them falling on him. He did the best he could to keep up his appearance as the dapper hero of half a dozen MGM pictures. Clearing his throat, the handsome leading man nodded. A strong flop sweat was glistening off his brow.

"Yeah, yes, of course …" The first hints of his Birmingham brogue came out after fifteen years. When George unstuck the knife with a plunk, there was just a hint of a whimper of fear, eyes closed. But when he pulled his hand back he found it unscathed. With a long sigh of relief, he straightened his tux, and licked his lips.

"Very well, there's always more than one way to take care of a problem." He walked away. Mary watched him go, while George turned back toward the bar sheathing his Indian blade on his belt.

From the mirror he watched as Sinclair came up to two familiar meat and muscle men in cheap suits that were close by. They were Roman Apollo's men from earlier. He watched him point out George and sighed in response. He had forgotten that Apollo had mentioned being the financial backer to one of Sinclair's upcoming movies. The studio was either hitting a hard time, or Sinclair was in some kind of trouble with the wrong people and promised more than he could deliver to get this kind of protection. Roman Apollo's help didn't come cheap and with Sinclair so close to his family, too close, he wasn't sure what he had promised the Gangster.

"George …"

The name that came from Mary's glossy lips seemed to stick in her mouth. It was a word, a collection of sounds that she hadn't tasted in so long. But it had always remained a part of her. It might have been rusted, but it was bolted to her breast, to her very everlasting soul, never to be pried from her.

The young man turned to look at his mother as she struggled with the emotions at the mere calling of his name. "Maybe you should go …" She placed a hand on his arm, turning to see the two large men that had come straight from Apollo's protection detail approaching.

She was shocked when George shrugged her hand off rudely. "Maybe you should …" There was a spark of rage in his eyes. "It's what your best at." He said hatefully.

The magic of what should've been felt between any other mother and son had gone away. All the resentment and lonely nights of the last ten years heaped upon George. This was Jonah's club, this was his friends' club, and this was his club, and still Mary chose society, chose the fear of embarrassment and scandal rather than what was right.

Lady Mary wanted to say something to him. But she couldn't find the words, his statement stung her. She felt all the love in the world for him swirling in her breast, he invaded the very core of her mind, and yet she could feel that George wasn't himself. Or maybe he was and she just didn't know him. But it was the right night of heartbreak, alcohol, regret, and adolescent rage that had George Crawley with liquor on his breath and trouble on his mind.

And he was spoiling for a fight.

There was no talking him off the ledge when the two men stopped just feet from the slouched youth. Mary wanted to open her mouth in protest, when the rest of the crowd in the bar got up and moved away. She would later curse herself when she found that she had done the same, rather than being caught in the spotlight of the coming scandal. The dark skinned bartender, kept one eye on the men, and the other on George's glass that he was about to fill.

"Leave the bottle." George ordered. His back was still to the looming men.

There was just the look of smugness that confused thugs when the bartender walked away. The man had slung drinks in some pretty rough places before and he alone, with exception of George, knew what was coming next.

"I hear there's, uh, problem here …" Kermit addressed George with innuendo. The former Pinkerton with a Staten Island accent punched his clubbed cast into his palm with a sickening thud.

"There is …" George confirmed. "Somewhere a side show closed up because they lost their main attraction. But, then, I guess, they say you can never go home again, right Kermit?" George pulled the bottle closer.

"You got a big mouth, anyone ever tell you that, spud?" Rocco the mob enforcer gritted his teeth. All his features were sanded down, and there was a shared likeness to a squashed grape on his reddening face. The former boxer may have thrown more fights than he won, but the champs were all in bread lines. But for a few of their punches in the mush, he had a job with pretty good pay and travel.

The teen snorted. "Isn't that what they said about your mother when she went up to the pasture to visit her favorite cow? Or did they give your old man a name in Sicily?" he asked with an arrogant swagger.

The larger men were now primed for their duty even more than before. "Sir, I think it's time for you to leave …" There was a mock propriety in the way Rocco addressed George. He held his arms open as he chose his words carefully to entertain the crowd watching. "You're in a, uh, dress code violation with club policy." He shrugged in satisfaction with his excuse and a charming Guinea smile.

"Is that right?" George held the bottle close. "I forgot in England they'd just about let anyone in to these places, including a couple of dumb apes, as long as they're wearing bow ties." He shook his head, letting the bite really sink in.

"You gonna leave?"

"Why, you gotta date with the chandelier later, banana eater?"

The veins visible on their temples were a clear sign that insult had been the last straw.

The two men advanced, Kermit taking the lead. They reached their big meaty hooks out to grab the fresh kid and teach him some manners his butler, obviously, didn't go over. They were inches from his leather clad shoulder when George snapped around, and with a loud shatter he broke the bottle on Kermit's face. The large man fell to the floor, covering his bloody face. Jumping to his feet, George used his momentum and crashed Rocco in the jaw with a hard and uncomfortable slap of knuckle on flesh and bone. It was enough power to knock down an elephant … however George Crawley had picked a fight with a rhino. Known as Rocco 'The Rhino' he had made a career taking punches in the face from pretty boys that looked good on marquee fight posters.

George reared back to hit him again, hesitating upon noticing that the big mammoth hadn't moved an inch from the force. Once more, he slammed his fist into the large man's face, The Rhino allowing it. The crowd of Lords and Ladies made a groan at the force, and, yet still, Rocco stood seemingly unaffected by George's new hit. Finally, he responded by spitting a bloody, splintered, tooth at the teenager. With a snatch, he grabbed George by his lapels and lifted him off his feet with ease. Then, with a heave, he threw the young man across the bar area and into the VIP section.

He flew over a corded off velvet rope and landed on a table with a rattle. Drinks spilt all over Lady Anne Struthers and The Countess of Gillingham. Sliding off their table from the force of the toss, he rolled to a halt on the plush carpet in front of a table where Lady Rose was gossiping about her daughter's first crush with Laura Edmunds, 'The Sketches' Senior Editor and Tom Branson's long time, and long suffering, Girlfriend. A Hollywood Director was enquiring after a car or two for production from Tom. While Lady Edith was fighting off a host of agents that wanted to know if her little girl was ready to be a star. Lady Mary's pre-engagement party was a mixture of old friends and new ones from show business as they celebrated Marigold's brilliant performance that night at a nightclub her Marchioness mama had invested in.

But everyone at the table stood up when George groaned, sliding to a halt in front of them. His jacket protected him from the carpet burn, but he heard something clicking in his shoulder.

"Saints preserve … !" Tom Branson helped his nephew to his feet. He had never been more surprised to see him back and here of all places. "What the devil is going …" He was asking when George grabbed him by his tux jacket.

"Get back!" He pushed his uncle out of the way when the ground shaking announced the Rhino was charging.

He ducked out of the way of a haymaker that could've taken his head right off. People around them screamed in surprise, backed away to the railing, or fled as the two battled in front of the VIP guests. Rocco continued to swing at George, while the boy used his speed to duck, dodge, and dance away from each blow. Finally, getting the knuckle dragger angry, George slid between his legs and rolled underneath Lord Gillingham and Mr. Blake's table. Cursing the slippery coward, he pushed an indignant Mr. Blake out of the way, sending him over the railing and onto the dance floor.

He swatted away the high born ladies that fled from the table like a flutter of startled birds in French fashion. But just as he bent down to lift the heavy table, it tilted up savagely and uppercut the enforcer on the chin. Dazed, but shaking it off, he tried again, only to be clipped fiercely once more with a teeth chattering force. Blood and spit oozed from a bit tongue as the Rhino stumbled away in concussion. George slid out from the table that he had used his feet to tilt up as a weapon, and tried to press his attack to finish off the thug.

He reared back to hit Rocco when his fist was caught mid-swing. It was Roger Sinclair who decided to join in the fight to at least say he got in on it, before letting his loaned muscle do the rest. He struck George in the cheek bone with a haymaker taught to him by a stuntman on the Warner back lot. It was not a surprise that the shrill noise of pain came from the man who threw the punch rather than from the teenager who ate it.

George stumbled backward and right into the waiting frame of Kermit whose entire face was bleeding from dozens of glass shards. He restrained the boy while Rocco, still woozy, wound up and hit the boy with a vicious, but only half powered punch to the face. When he hit George in the stomach with his second swing, Tom tried to jump in but was immediately restrained by Atticus and Lord Gillingham, who knew that the spry revolutionary, who would always be a Mick in his heart, was long past these kinds of things.

Men that big and that strong would kill the pacifist Irishman.

However, when the Rhino went for George's face again, the boy had the mind to jerk his head out of the way. It was bruiser on bruiser violence, when the fuzzy headed enforcer hit Kermit right in the nose. The crunch in the youth's ears meant blinding pain, teary strewn eyes, and loose grip. Using his hazy restrainer as support, he leaned back, kicking his feet up. When Rocco came at him again, he ate George's boot soles. Using the force in his legs, George pummeled the Rhino over and over again, till he fell over the railing himself. Using his momentum, the teen grabbed the former Pinkerton in a reverse head lock and swung downward. Now blinded by tears and pain, Kermit couldn't find the planted resistance of his weight advantage. George flung him over his shoulder, and slammed his enemy down on the Gillingham table which collapsed under the weight.

One more time, Sinclair came at George. But this time the scrapper got out of the way of his haymaker. Grabbing a lamp off the table, the teen jerked back from a swing and then broke it on the side of the movie star's face in counter. He knocked him back into his own party's table. He covered his bloody forehead where he had been impacted by the hot light bulb. George went after him in a murderous rage, when a hand grabbed him by the back of his upturned jacket collar. He was picked up off his feet and slammed right in front of Lady Rose and Lord and Lady Gillingham's teenage daughter.

Kermit blinded and in pain, still couldn't be knocked over yet. The former Pinkerton who had a long history of letting George Crawley slip through his fingers, was gonna finish the job that had cost him his badge and family in '32. He had seemed like a berserker, blood oozing from every hole and tiny gash on his face as he slammed the teen down and was ready to punch him till he was dead. But George moved his head in the last moment, the heavy fist causing the breaking of supports underneath the table. The teen jammed a knee in the man's Solar-Plexus and gave a disorienting palm strike to his broken nose. Kermit back away when George popped back to his feet and began a furious barrage of punches.

In full retreat, the Pinkerton was backed down right into a dark skinned arm. Large and beefy, the arm hooked the big man by the neck and ripped him into an incapacitating chokehold. Charlie "Lead Belly" Steadman had been told of the commotion, thinking that it was just a couple of drunken assholes fighting over whose goddamn garden on their estate was better. Instead he was surprised and endeared to find that it was George polishing up on his squabbles. The boy was fighting three of them at a time, just like the old days.

And George used to wonder why they all call him 'Swashbuckler' in the heat of a 'damn good' fight.

"Damnit, George …" Lead Belly chuckled holding the older man in vice like he was restraining a misbehaving toddler. "I thought I told you that the party started after we closed!" He grabbed a glass of wine off of Lady Rose's place and drank a draft before pouring the rest of it on Kermit's head. Then, like a shot-put thrower, he swung the big man off his feet and threw him over the edge.

"You know me …" George took the hand that was offered in a clasp of grateful brotherhood. "I like to meet trouble half-way …" he started.

"Kills the suspense."

Both young men said in unison. Together Charlie lightly smacked George on the back of the head while the teen jabbed the boy on the arm in response to the old motto.

Suddenly, Roger Sinclair came flying at the two friends. Fist raised, he threw a heavy punch at Lead Belly. Toeing the line between what was acceptable and what would get him out of the fight with reputation intact, he knew that the American Press, especially in Democrat, socialist, Hollywood wouldn't bat an eye at him hitting a colored kid. Throwing the punch was his first mistake. His second was aiming for the large boy's gut.

In the aftermath Charlie stared in complete confusion, unaffected, while his attacker winched in pain, holding his arm tenderly stiff, hunched around it. It was as if he had punched an iron wall of a freighter. The young bouncer glared daggers. "Boy …" he sucked his teeth in annoyance. With one hand he steadied Sinclair, and then with one smooth motion he brought his other fist down like a hammer pounding a railroad spike. Sinclair was driven to the carpet with force from the top of his head, slamming face first, eating lint.

George grabbed the man off the floor, lifting him in the air and slamming him down hard on the table. There was a dark and murderous madness on George. It was Marigold, her Russian Prince Charming, their kiss, his mother forgetting him. All of it built into an uncontrollable rage of the pain, suffering, and horror of the last eight years that crawled through him. And he shoved all of it down Roger Sinclair's throat. There was a demon in the boy's hateful blue eyes that had blackened his thoughts and sense of himself.

When he finally came out of it, his Uncle Tom, Atticus, and even Charlie were holding him back. Sinclair's right eye was swollen shut, his mouth and nose was flooded with dark red blood. George looked like a vicious animal on a leash as they pulled him away from the movie star.

"George, come on, me lad, let lone!" Tom struggled as they pulled him away from the ladies and what remained of Sinclair on the table.

As they struggled, a flash of golden hued blond hair and a matching silk evening gown swept toward them quickly. The tiara she wore framed her worried milky face. She was followed by an older woman with ginger hair that had some salt in it. She wore a blue and black patterned gown, her eyes widened in unfamiliar territory. The much younger woman of much more important stature strode forward and tapped Charlie on the shoulder in alarm with her gloved hand. The boy obeyed the wordless command of his boss.

"Hey, come on, George!" He coached as the young man struggled against the superior strength. He tossed the teenager back, right into the waiting arms of the high class woman. She immediately stood in front of him, cupping his face.

"Darling, it's alright, let it be!" Lady Edith Pelham tried to catch her nephew's eyes. Her gloved hand's framed George's cheeks to force him face to face. "Darling, look at me!" She demanded maternally. When he found her golden eyes, she nodded. "Not here, my darling, listen to me! … Not here!" She said breathlessly. A moment of restraint fell over him at the sweet and maternal voice who he had only ever loved. Angrily, George shrugged off his aunt's grip and Charlie's big restraining hand on his shoulder.

"Alright!" He snarled, irritable at all the hands on him. "I'm alright!" He surrendered to the wall of male family members that blocked him out, and the grip that his aunt had on his shirt. Edith kissed him gently, and tried to examine his face, George fighting her the entire way.

To the face she suddenly recognized, Lady Rose went sheet white as she watched the young man get talked down. She hadn't seen him since … since that night. Laura Edmunds caught her just before she backed right off the railing and onto the crowded dance floor below. She saw the cuts on his face, the rugged appearance, and the same violent rage in his eyes as that night. She couldn't help comparing it to the boy she used to cuddle with at night when she missed home. She let out a sob. Those easily distracted, called out to her, but Rose ran off sobbing. She felt the guilt and an old fear of hell hounds at her heels for an old sin. Laura was hesitant before she chased after the young mother.

As the two women passed, a large man with a grotesque bulging eyeball walked out of the shadow. He looked satisfied and thoroughly entertained by the high flying, swashbuckling style of George Crawley. It was all piss, vinegar, and mockery of the young Viscount. He had waited years to see what Rose Aldridge had, and George didn't disappoint. Not only did he see, but so did every one of the Peers. He finally got Crawley for good this time.

He walked up to the scene, catching a side-long glance of Lady Edith absently massaging her nephews damaged face. He looked over at Sinclair and tutted him, dropping his cigar ashes on the actor. Suddenly both Kermit and Rocco appeared at their master's side like whipped betas of the pack. Rocco was wandering from one side to the other, like a bowling ball rolling down a stony hill. While Kermit was breathing heavily, wiping sheets of blood off his cut open face, staring pained daggers at George. The mobster looked at both his men and chuckled.

He turned to Kermit. "See, didn't I tell you, mooks not go mean mugging, Georgie. Ain't I been tell'in ya? Tell'in ya that Georgie got a little bit of the devil. Ain't that right? You got a bit of the devil in ya, don't yous?" He put his cigar in his mouth and then turned to the shocked, appalled, and confused crowd. "Well, ain't he, folks?" He announced to them. There was a tense moment, before someone began to clap in a forced and uncomfortable manner. Suddenly the rest began to applaud. It made George squirm.

It was another form of mockery.

He gave a theatrical look around. "I, uh, don't see Lady Sinderby anywhere …" He chomped on his cigar. "I guess some of us ain't no forgive and forget Christians, huh?" He winked. "What do you think, kid? Was it all the familiar faces or just bad memories, huh?" He blew out a smoke ring in the general direction Rose had fled.

"You Guinea slime!"

George tried to fight his way from Tom and Atticus's grip, but was ultimately restrained by the impossibly strong Charlie Stedman who held his sworn brother in check while Edith coached against rash action. Seeing that George might break free, Kermit was about to engage when Apollo put up an arm bar of restraint. The Sicilian gangster was enjoying this little display of savagery from his old enemy. By the time it was over, there wasn't a London house or English Country Estate that would invite or accept a Grantham within its halls.

"Gentlemen …!"

A smooth and cordial southern voice called out to the two figures ready to fight one another. Jonah appeared between the two parties. He was smooth, confident, and very cool as he clapped his hands together. "Come on, boys, the worlds too big for such ancient history to blow the top off a good night, now!" The older of the two young men said without a falter in his voice, keeping things light. He was aware of the Lords, Ladies, and other swells watching in interest.

The Gangster nodded with a grumble of agreement. "I don't know, Jonah …" He said with a familiarity that the young black man didn't like from a man who took pleasure in evicting African Americans from his slums. "I'd call your boy off." Roman snorted with a shake of his head. "I ain't no old Knickerbocker, some cross burn'in cracker, or lazy ass Mexican bandito. That inbred limey don't even know who he's messin with." He warned.

Suddenly, the figure that Edith had arrived with walked forward toward the gangster shielded by Jonah. The woman had flawless posture and was coldly diplomatic when she greeted the stocky knuckle draggers. Edith turned from massaging George's chest comfortingly and watched.

"Good evening, sir. I'm Lady Rosamund Painswick, and I'd like to apologize for any misunderstanding that my niece's young friend might have caused. I do hope that this mistake doesn't interfere too much with your night. If there's anything I might be able to do, please, let me know."

The scratchy voiced sound of Old World elegance almost had a music to it that diffused the tension in the room. George glared in disbelief at his Aunt Edith at the "young friend" comment. It seemed properly plausible that his own great-aunt didn't even know who he was ... period.

The man gave a look over to George and Edith, and then seemed to become the happy go lucky New Yorker with a bit of 'Blue Collar, Hudson, charm'. "No, ma'am … me and Georgie over here, just got too much history, too much alpha. Us men, when it gets too much, we either grab a broad or a bat, you know?" He laughed.

Rosamund gave a smile that looked so genuine. One might have believed that she actually found a fondness for the Sicilian's candor. "Oh, trust me, I'm all too aware …" She chortled under breath. Like some elegant bird, wizen and seasoned, she turned to one of the girls in the back. "Emma, darling it's been too long." She addressed the underage girl with a smile. "Good lord, you look so much like your Mama, I thought I saw a ghost. You must come to tea next week, I insist." She smiled.

Without a goodbye she turned from the gangster's side of the barroom and motioned with her eyes for Jonah to do his thing. There was no movement till the music started from the bandstand again. With a subtle motion of his head, the waitresses, cigarette girls, and staff began serving again. With the show over, eventually the Lords and Ladies moved on back to their tables with something to talk about.

The young owner motioned for Lady Edith to file George away toward the front. While he turned toward Roman who was admiring the ant like order in which the colony of Peers went back into the unchangeable order of things.

"Ain't gotta tell you, Roman …" Jonah said. "But you got five minutes to scrape your Nazi thug off my table and get the hell out of my club along with the rest of the Hollywood leeches." He was still smiling as the stragglers gossiped and continued to watch.

The gangster chuckled and blew smoke in the young man's face. "Ain't that like a Nigger, get a little power, and it goes right between his legs don't it, Fuzzy?" He smirked belligerently. There was a tense moment, but when he saw that Jonah wasn't going to bite he nodded. "Alright, alright, you win this one." He inhaled through his nose. "Go on boys, scrape the limey up, and truck the sluts. The night is young!" He ordered with an excited and enthusiastic growl as he stretched. As the Hollywood party was upended Jonah turned to leave.

A hand caught his arm. "I guess this goes without saying …" Roman Apollo pulled him back. "But if Crawley sets one foot in New York, there's gonna be a bounty on his head so large, he wouldn't even be safe in a bank vault …" He was smiling so large that Jonah could count the gangster's gold teeth. He nodded when he saw that the younger man got the idea. "yeah … ahhh? He chuckled and rubbed Jonah's head violently as he walked away

George fought his friend, uncles, and Edith when Charlie finally tossed him back toward the entrance of the club. Lady Edith threw herself against him, while Lead Belly fanned him off with his hands in metaphor. His Aunt Rosamund clenched her hands together, standing straight as a screen from the prying eyes of the parties that were seated toward the front. She smiled at them with a nod, when they glance over before looking away. Though, when they leaned in, she knew exactly who they were talking about.

"So …"

Everyone in the party turned to find Mary standing outside the crowd. She looked cold, shocked, and furious. By tomorrow all they'd be talking about was how her son beat her movie star fiancé to a pulp. She could take or leave the gossip, but in the course of ten minutes her entire life had been blown apart. They all parted for Lady Mary as she approached. Everyone, that is, but Edith, who felt that even if nothing was going to happen, there should be someone between the two. Mary didn't stop till she was inches from her son. Her cold, angry, eyes raked George's appearance over.

"You're back from your little adventures." She finished with an emotionless chill in her voice.

If George was a cat all his fur would've stood up and his hiss would've been pure venom. The trivialization of everything that happened to him in eight years was what he was expecting, but he underestimated just how much his mother could get under his skin.

"Don't worry, it'll sink in when your boyfriend is bleeding all over your gown on the way back." He spat in her face. Tom squinched his eyes shut in pain, feeling the anger and tension between the two come exploding out like a broken dam that held in ten years of resentment.

Mary made an amused noise with a prissy superior look for the boy. "Well, it's a stroke of luck Anna suggested red tonight." She shrugged a bare shoulder at him with a quirked eyebrow.

Retaliation in a much nastier comment was coming, when Edith corralled George back in time. "Mary, you're not helping, at all." She shook her head with a look of utter disgust for her sister. She hadn't seen her child in eight years and now that he was back, she wanted to treat him like a high born girl she didn't like at their Debutante teas when they were young.

But before Mary could address her sister, a convoy of the rich and powerful from the other side of an ocean and continent made the 'perp walk' out the door with coats in hand. They were escorted by Jonah. Two of Roman's henchmen, battered and bandaged from Newport, had each of Sinclair's arms wrapped around their shoulders as they dragged him out, coat over his bloody and swollen face to disguise him from photographers waiting outside.

Strolling by, Roman Apollo in an all-black, fur lined coat dumped a bowler hat on his head. He observed the sight of Lady Edith's back pressed tight against George's front, separating the world from him. He snickered to himself till the entire Crawley party noticed. Each breath of his growing chortle had dense clouds of smoke spewing like an industrial chimney from his maw.

He gave a long sigh and signaled to his men to have a look at George and Edith. "Don't nothing ever change, boys?!" He said aloud to his men, folding his arms, tapping the ash off his Cuban. "George Crawley's always been good at starting shit, but when it comes down to being a man … mmm." He puffed his smoke. "He runs to hide behind the Marchioness Lady Edith's fancy skirt." He chomped his cig and tipped his hat to the woman. "Hell, I bet he's got that sweet ass memorized like a silk pillow by now, after all the times he's coward against it!" He laughed.

"Hey, Hey, HEY!"

"I'm gonna finish what your mother started with that wire hanger, you Ellis Island tick!"

The laughing mockery that showered over an embarrassed and bullied Edith sparked a flash of renewed anger that thundered with an explosion through George's chest in reflexive protectiveness. Charlie, Tom, Atticus, and Edith held the boy back as he made a new struggle to get at the gangster. But Apollo only gave a loud belly laugh, content with himself. He patted one of his henchmen on the back as they exited "The Runaway".

The group of family and friends held the boy back long enough for the party to exit. "Alright, goddamnit! I'm alright!" He furiously shrugged off everyone's grip on him. His friend, Lead Belly, even giving the boy a push to keep him away from the barrier they created so he wouldn't pursue his enemy out the door.

The teen angrily straightened his leather jacket, his eyes focused squarely on the door. He was nursing a bruised ego, a burned pride, and the swirling of a dark adolescent anger. George Crawley was the angriest of angry young man that had ever been tempered in youth. But since Fort Worth, his sadness had turned to a ceaseless rage that bordered on madness. In any other day, Roman Apollo, wouldn't have been able to scratch his armor. But without the girl he loved, without his future, without Marigold, he felt lost. After his fights in New Orleans and Newport, he just couldn't get it out of his system. He felt on edge all the time and he hated everyone and everything. He hated his Aunt Edith for being the hammer that broke his heart. He hated his family for all the lies they willingly kept from him when he put his heart, soul, and future in the love of a girl he now knew he could never have. It was just one more check on a long list of things these people, this life, had stolen from him.

Then there was his mother …

The young, suave, club owner walked up stiffly to Mary. He had, on his arm, a long mink coat. There was a solid quality to his face, uncompromising, and filled with a certain distain for the business lady. He held it out to Mary to take.

"I'm sorry Lady Mary … that means you too."

The red eyed beauty looked mortified and almost incensed. In all of her life, Mary Josephine Crawley and never been asked to leave, or in this case, bounced from an establishment, any establishment. Her eyes were wide like silver dollars and in her moment of embarrassment she turned to her best friend and life-long partner Tom Branson.

The broad shouldered Irishman sighed uncomfortably and strode forward with a diplomatic look. "Jonah …" He shook his head. "Come on now. She's with us." He motioned between himself, Edith, Atticus, and Lady Rosamund. "Surely …" he continued.

Jonah just shook his head. "She brought that man into my club. He attacked one of the owners, and disturbed the customers. Moreover, if he's paling around with Roman Apollo, he or anyone close to him ain't got any business here. I won't look the other way, Mr. Branson, not when it comes to those who attack my sworn brothers." He was stalwart and uncompromising.

"I see …" was all Mary said. There was an unreadable look on her face when she turned to George. It wasn't anger, but it wasn't full regret either. It was a silent look of wondering, of asking without asking. Where they drawing lines now? Where they forcing people to take sides between the two of them? If you supported George, you could not be friends or associate with Mary and as well around the river bend?

George could've saved her, could've talked Jonah, his sworn brother, into giving her a reprieve. But he said nothing, not even when all eyes turned to him. He'd turn her out to the cold, as she had done it to him eight years ago.

For once, his mother would know what he had felt like for ten long years.

"Very well …" Mary relied on Atticus to help her into her coat. "I'm going straight up, Aunt Rosamund." She turned and kissed her aunt on the cheek.

"I'll come with you." Tom said going to get his coat.

Mary stopped him. "No need …" There was frost bite to her voice. "Laura is back there with Rose, waiting. Plus, I wouldn't want to break up the party." She had a sting in her congeal voice at the group of people surrounding George.

But still she walked up to her son, Edith between them. She looked into her child's eyes for a long moment, face to face. His hot breath stung her milky cheeks. His glare for her was near hateful. She had let him down tonight, as she had let him down for the last ten years. In the end, the Sicilian was right. Did nothing ever change?

Finally, she leaned in and gave him a chaste peck on the corner of his mouth. "Goodnight darling …" She said as if he was still six years old, on his way to bed for the night and they'd reconvene for tea time tomorrow. She was undeterred and unfazed as she sashayed out of the nightclub with loud clicks of her heals on the floor. Tom, despite her rebuff, still raced back with his coat on. He asked Edith to make his excuses to Laura, again. He rushed out to catch up with his best friend and sister to escort her back to Rosamund's.

For one more time in his life, George watched his mother walk away from him. He couldn't decide what hurt more. The memories of what that kiss had once meant to him, or the knowledge that after eight years not a damn thing had changed between the two.

"You're making yourself look like an ass out there, kid."

Blue eyes in vengeful musings looked up to find the grown figure of one of his oldest friends walking up to him. Jonah just shook his head at the younger teen. He could feel the darkness inside his friend. It wasn't just the wrong night to pick a fight with George Crawley, it was the wrong person in general. He knew the young man well enough that the swashbuckler would fight every person in this club just to make the pain go away.

"Look, I gotta set these people back up right …" Jonah explained in hush. "We're gonna talk." The young owner pointed to his friend in promise. Adjusting his bow tie, he turned to Lady Edith and Charlie for approval. When he got a nod from his old boss and a thumb up from the large boy, he straightened his white jacket and swaggered back to the public with a cool stride to his step that went with the music.

Slowly, the party broke up. Atticus took a moment to shake George's hand and welcome him back. It was unclear if he was happy to see the boy under such circumstances. But the man had never been more grateful to the boy. He and his family owned him their lives, as it was George's quick and clever thinking in New York that got them to the Empire's Consulate before the Pinkertons stormed San Sochi. The man wasn't stupid, and he had spent years pondering it, even separating from Rose till recently. But, Atticus Aldridge, future Lord Sinderby, knew that something had happened between George and Rose, something that neither one would talk about. All he knew was that Rose owed everything to the boy … everything. And for that, he'd always be grateful to him, no matter how much of a rabble rouser he had become.

When Charlie left for the bar, giving a clasped brace of upraised hand to George, all that was left was George and Edith. The beautiful example of class and fashion stroked George's cheek tenderly and with the instinct of a deep maternal love.

"Darling, when did you get back?" She asked quietly.

The stately vision in gold was clearly worried and heart sick at the lacerated scarring on his eye and bridge of the nose. At any point in time his Aunt Edith's touch would have been welcome, it having always been a rarity to a boy with very little parental comfort in his life. Even at his angriest, he fought the urge to turn into her soft touch. But after the sudden devastating bombshell of Marigold and the mockery of Roman Apollo's inferences to George's cowardly history hiding behind her love, Edith's touches stung more than helped.

"This morning …" He answered shortly, snatching her gloved wrist.

He glared with warning that he didn't want her sympathies. A part of him felt bad for the stricken look of a deep hurt on his aunt's face at the rejection of her love. She retracted her silk covered hand and looked away. She thought that with Mary gone, with everyone gone, that they could be themselves. There was a different kind of maternal intimacy between the two that no one else had with the boy. For eight years Edith had done all she could for George, had seen firsthand the horrors he dealt with. She'd say that out of anyone in the world, with the exception of Marigold, she knew her nephew, her boy, the best. But now that she expected to have her love returned, even if it was in private, she was rebuffed angrily.

It had been the same looks and reactions from Marigold as well. It seemed since they had left Texas, Edith had been the unknown perpetrator of some grave crime against the two people who she loved most in the world. Her little girl had been an emotional wreck, she had been hiding at Downton for months, crying into Sybbie's lap, broken heartedly distant at luncheons with Rose, and sandwiched in the embrace of her grandparents as she curled between them in the dark of the night. Mama called her, worried desperately for her 'baby'. Even at Edith and Mary's worst with Matthew and Michael, she had never seen such a beautiful, pure, flower so heart broken. Mary had said that it was 'obviously' Edith's fault, that she had done something. But now that she had such rage, such anger, directed at her from George, she knew now that possibly Mary had been right after all …

"You should've called ahead." She looked sad, her look crestfallen in disappointment. "I could've asked …"

"No!" George snapped.

"Mama to make up a room at Crawley House …" Edith finished. She looked more hurt than ever, knowing that he thought she'd say her and Marigold's London flat.

He felt a sudden kinship of how much he related so passionately to his mother's life long disdain for his Aunt in that moment. She was clingy, expected too much from a simple shared moment, and her crestfallen look of rejection of something that was never offered in the first place somehow woke the fire of sadism within him. George knew from his years in New York that his Aunt Edith was made up of all the worst qualities of a teenage princess named Cora Levinson that she never outgrew, just passed onto her daughter. Even standing in front of him, he could understand with great dislike, what the Knickerbocker hags saw each time they talked of Cora. All he kept thinking was how they would've eaten his Aunt Edith alive.

"No …" George repeated, trailing off. He felt deeply shamed for his dark and awful thoughts of someone he knew he loved too much to hate.

"Or at my house …"

Rosamund finally made her presence known. She raked over the young man in astute observation. The last time she had saw him, he was a doe eyed little boy with blond hair, shorts, tweed jacket and little tie. Now he was a rugged and handsome young man that had no English about him. In fact, he had Cora's look so strongly that he and Sybbie could almost have been mistaken for her twins.

George glared at the middle-aged woman. "I didn't take you for someone who housed _strangers_." He fired at his great-aunt.

Edith immediately turned to Rosamund looking apologetic. There was a roughness and an edge to the George that Edith, Marigold, and Sybbie had gotten used to, but the family would be harder to adapt. She learned the hard way when Tom first laid eyes on the boy in Texas, after almost eight years he had been in for a shock of what Matthew and Mary's boy had become. George only made it harder for him to adjust when they actually talked. But Rosamund seemed to take him in stride.

"Yes, well, I do, on occasion, like a bit of a gamble I suppose." She brushed his brash, moody comment off expertly.

As someone who had broken his parents up, once. Rosamund had become a keen observer of her nieces and the loves of their lives. She found George to be nothing like Matthew, but more of an unrefined Mary, which, in essence, made him very much Sybil in Rosamund's recollection. His mother, Mary, since she could walk and talk, had been scooped up by mama and herself. At the time they foolishly convinced Cora that the only way Mary could survive London society was if they taught her how to be the perfect little English debutante, and she has been a smashing success ever since. But Sybil, like her look alike daughter and nephew, was completely spirit with no refinement. She was sweet, kind, and graceful, but had her father's foul temper at her worst, and found many things that they had all accepted as social religion to be the height of foolishness. After two girls that had been raised their way, Cora told Robert and Mama, that Sybil was to be raised her way. Rosamund would admit that she was not overly close to Sybil. But she had often attended tea at the Dowager House in which her mama often ranted of the absurdity of the sight of a noble daughter of a great house always trailing after her mother. It was the height of ridiculousness of a future grand lady being led like a duckling clutching her mama and sisters skirts, rather than in the nursery with a governess learning the way of things properly. Now, those were but small quibbles of the days of yore if Violet Crawley had lived long enough to see the future of the Earldom in his Levinson coloring, American accent, and cowboyish style. No matter how hard Lady Violet Crawley tried, since the moment in New York when Robert said I do … Cora, in the end, had won the war.

And that made Rosamund smile.

"There's more than enough room. In fact …" She would have continued but was halted by the look that Edith gave her. Her eyes widened and she shook her head in warning of her aunt. It was obvious that the knowledge of who was staying with Rosamund for the week should not be relayed to George. If the young man wasn't so angry he might have questioned what the secret was they were hiding.

"Thanks, but no thanks …" George dodged his aunt's prying hand that was trying to examine his healing cuts. "I'd feel better on my own." He replied.

"Yes …" The Marchioness agreed, giving up on trying to get her nephew to open up to her. She turned to Rosamund. "It's been a long time since he and everyone have been under the same roof. We must let these things fall by … degrees." She met her aunt's eyes in unspoken words of what they were keeping from him.

The older woman smirked tightly. "Mm … yes, indeed." She agreed.

Finally George caught on to their game, but remained quiet. A man from a far called to the two women. He looked familiar to the boy, like he had seen him somewhere. He could've sworn it was in a magazine about movies. The choir boy looking chap waved them over.

"I think he's taken a shine to you …" Rosamund smiled at Edith.

The woman smiled shyly. "No, he just wants to know more about Marigold. He's very interested." There was something whimsical in her voice.

"Marigold potentially getting a movie role … Mary a matron of Hollywood … Such sudden excitement?" Lady Rosamund exclaimed conversationally.

George's insides clenched and his heart felt like it'd fall into the abyss in his stomach. "You know what … go back to your party. I'm gonna be at the bar." He said darkly.

"Oh, I'm sure …" Rosamund called after him.

"Probably for the best, darling, I'd regain my calm for a while." She nodded. "When you're ready to go, we can go to Crawley House, I'm sure Papa and Mama are desperate to …" her face fell when George walked away.

"No thanks."

Edith looked worried and sad as she was flatly rejected by George. She watched him walk away with depression in her eyes.

The two women watched George take a seat in the stool next to Charlie. His friend and sworn brother clasped his hand again with spirit, before throwing his arm around his shoulders with victory of a good fight. The bartender shook George's hand in respect and congratulations as Charlie laughed and cut up. There was especially spirited reunion when Jonah returned with Jimmy McMurray, the lead singer of the "New Orleans Jacks" and one of the original Runaways. Jimmy let out a testosterone fueled roar of surprise and elation, causing a startled scene. He rushed up and threw himself against George. The two came together like long lost, and very beloved, family members. Jimmy laughed in joy as they rocked back and forth in a hard embrace. When they broke apart George pinched the heartbreaker's cheek, commenting on how when he last saw him he used to look like he was storing nuts for the winter. Pushing George's hand away to the sound of laughter, the two, arm in arm over the shoulder, took a seat. With Charlie joking, Jimmy laughing, George smiling, and Jonah pouring the drinks …

The Runaways were reunited again.

"What an interesting young man …" Rosamund seemed genuinely impressed.

Edith glared at the contrarian next to her. "You only like him, because, Granny would've died of disapproval." She accused dismissively.

"True … though he's not so far from the tree as you and he would like to think. Your father was about the same when he was courting your mama. One minute he was ready to fight Edmund _Van Houten_ for the inferring rumors of your Mama's immaturity, the next, crestfallen when she danced with those same boys who mocked her. Your Papa would like to think, and have everyone believe, that he was some smooth talking fortune hunter. But I think he had always been in love with Cora. He just didn't want to admit it to anyone, especially, mama."

The older Lords and Ladies kept a wary and disapproving eye on the young man. But the fresh debutantes in the crowd, accompanying their mothers, were slowly circling the teen in interest and heart eyes. The express command of their fathers that forbid them contact with the handsome young Viscount of Downton Abbey and duel heir to the fortunes of the Grantham estate only drew them toward him more. He arrived home a rich, bad boy, with a plethora of stories of high and daring adventure, and a roguish reputation cemented in a bar brawl with the most famous movie star in the world. It was the rest of the young men of the Aristocracies worst nightmare. It was at the height of the London Season …

That George Crawley had returned home.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

"The Tennessee Waltz" – Anita O'Day

"Rebels" – Tom Petty & The Heart Breakers

"Longing" - InuYasha OST (George & Marigold Love Theme)

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _I'm just thankful to God it's all over … now we can get into the final several chapters. Trust me this took way longer than I ever expected for it to drag on, thanks for sticking in there guys._

 _While on we're on that subject in particular, I think I owe an apology. I'm sorry, MMarieRose, if you're still reading this. The rebuttal, of sorts, to your review was a complete misfire. I was on three hours of sleep and completely misread your review. I honestly thought you were dropping the story, and so I just wanted to fight my corner so to speak on characterizations, while also sincerely thank you for at least giving the story a shot. That wasn't Bullshit, btw, I really do appreciate you reading …_

 _In fact I appreciate everyone who reads this weird, pulp, story based on Downton Abbey and old Adventure Serials from the 30's._

 _But I do believe, MMarieRose, if I offended or you took my PM the wrong way, I am truly sorry. It was my mistake that I don't go to bed when I should and it was on me to comprehend what you actually wrote. If you do read this, I hope you continue to stick around …_

 _Cause there's like four chapters left anyway._

 _Love the reviews guys, if you have the time, it does help. And you might even get a long winded PM in the defense of the narrative from an asshole who should be asleep rather than watching one more Legend of Zelda theory video on Youtube._


	17. Somebody

**Somebody**

" _My heart is sore, I dare not tell, my heart is sore for Somebody  
I would walk a winter's night all for a sight of Somebody_

 _If Somebody were come again then one day he must cross the main  
And everyone will get his own and I will see my Somebody_

 _Ochon, for Somebody, Och hey, for Somebody,  
I would do, would I do not, All for the sake of Somebody_

 _Why need I comb my tresses bright, oh, why should coal or candlelight  
Shine in my bower day or night since gone is my dear Somebody_

 _Oh, I have wept many a day for one that's banished far away  
I cannot sing and must not say how sore I grieve for Somebody"_

 _ **"Somebody" – Connie Dover**_

* * *

 _Now_

The city streets were a bundle of flayed nerves and creeping shadows in shapes that were conjured by the human imagination in their worst moments of fear. The days of panic and riots were long gone. They had normalized their terror and rationalized their fear. The people of York hadn't been broken. They simply did what any good Englishman did, they bent. Each day, each hour, they found something to do, some task that needed mending. The day was rudely interrupted by the blaring of sirens, and they orderly went into the shelters and subway stations. When the bombing was over, they fixed their caps and bonnets, and went right back to what they were doing. And if it so happened that the Germans had obliterated where your job was, then you'd go onto finding something else to do. That was the Yorkshire way of things.

There ain't no trouble too big for a cup of tea and a strong back.

It had been more or less the same in the fancy and 'up and coming' streets of the city. There might have been more hesitancy to leave or an ease depending on your job. Those who only kept a flat or town house for the winter, had moved their things out ages ago, when this whole thing started. But there were a few people in the posh block of penthouse estates, whose income and rent was paid for by city business. They had no country home to fall back too in case of emergency. They were the well-to-do townies, or rising stars on a stop gap to London. These were the people who hesitated, flinched at the air raid sirens on the block. If their flat, if their business, their work was obliterated by a Nazi bomb, they'd have as much nothing as everyone else with a suitcase in hand and a toddler in arm flooding the shelters.

Sally Jones had known people like that her entire life. They were good people who had seen the bitter lives of their parents in the factory floors or pulling weeds from the tenant fields. They were never gonna be like them toffs, prancing around in tux and tails or silk and satin dresses, off to see Marigold Crawley at the Royal Ballet during the London season. But they had earned just enough to keep the tax man and the power company at bay. Buy their little girl that dolly in the corner in a couple of weeks. They were proud of the things they had bought, done the things that their parents had never dreamed of. Off the farm, in the office, and doing right by themselves in this world. And it didn't seem right that some plane just fly over and bomb them right back to their mother's womb.

Her Danny was a small time loan and insurance man for the farmers down Grantham's way. They were right dab in the middle between Thirsk and Ripon. Her daddy had told him that either town had industry, had workers who needed his insurance. But her Danny was clever. He told them that everyone and their dog who graduated in finance is flocking to Ripon and Thirsk. Them wheel turners will buy your policies for a couple of months till some new bloke comes along and steals them from you, right under your nose for cheap. But the farmers down Lady Mary Crawley's way, no one thought of them. If he could get a franchise with Lord Grantham for his farmers, if he was the only market in town, than those Downton honkeys would be buying "Jones Insurance" for generations. And that's what he did. And the day he shook that beautiful Lady Mary's hand, he went out and bought his wife the pendant that she was wearing right now.

Now when she walks down the street, people ask her if she had ever conversed with Lady Mary, the millionaire automobile heiress, who they say is a vampire who steals young, fresh girls to bath in their virginal blood. They ask if she's met Ms. Marigold Crawley, the beautiful, world famous, Prima Ballerina who had been the basis for all of her mother's best-selling young adult books. They want to know if she had laid eyes on George Crawley, the intrepid adventurer and daring racing pilot. She replied in order: briefly at a Downton dinner party, only in posters for the Met, and only on the cinema screen when they released the World's Fair footage of his exciting race. She learned from her Danny that they were all nearly bursting with pride of Ms. Marigold's accomplishments. They were all very excited for Lady Hexham's new book as well. But you must never, _ever_ , mention the name George Crawley to his Lordship or Lady Mary. They had seemed to have had a terrible falling out that left the deepest scars. She thought it a shame. He seemed a good chap, him being a Yank and what now.

She rubbed her pendent, thoughtfully as she adjusted little Edward in her arm with a bounce. She watched her other little angel, Lavender, hoist the pack of goods with her as they exited their flat. The girl wasn't nearly five years old, but she was carrying all the food she could in her little arms. If worst came to worst, they had two days of food and enough money to get them to her father's house in Ripon. She just prayed that her husband wouldn't worry about them. The silly sod was staying at some place called "Yew Tree Farm" that night. That was their life, her sipping tea at a nice shop, and her Danny sleeping with the pigs in some farm house in Grantham County. But then he wouldn't have it any other way, he tells her. "You think I make all this money for me, lass?" He would laugh. He does it for them, he does it for her. God only knows how she ended up with such a good man.

It made her think of the Crawley family. How she bet they didn't have any troubles in the world. All them toffs living in an actual castle, with all that automobile and farming money in their grasp. They get to hide behind their gothic spires in their big manor house in the middle of the country. There weren't any German bombs coming for them, their children weren't in any danger. There was George Crawley, she supposed, but they didn't even like him anyway, shame as much as that might be. But she couldn't fathom them having anywhere near the level of danger her lot was in right now. And if she came face to face with just one them, she'd set them straight about that.

As they moved down the corridor she saw that one of the doors in the hallway opened. They lived in a secluded and exclusive area of the estate. They didn't have many neighbors who could pay the rent that her Danny could. But they did know of a couple of young girls that had rented a very nice flat down the hall a ways from them. The girls had the better view, but Sally and her family had the more private spot. They never saw the girls, but she knew of one of them. She had been very pretty with long, black, curly tresses and blue eyes. She wore a RAF uniform and had a tackle box of mechanic's tools under her arm and a duffle bag on her shoulder. She hadn't seen her since, but she knew that her roommate still lived there. She was another RAF girl. She worked at Fighter Control from what Mrs. Davis had said from downstairs. But she had to be wrong.

No one had been more wrong in their life.

As the family shuffled down the hallway, they stared at the figure standing by her door. She was slender and taut as a bow string. Her posture was inhumanly straight, but could be controlled to the very twitch of a toe. A stack of books could be balanced on her head. She had soft and demure green eyes that had a thousand yard stare that carried a burden of sorrow in each pace. Her skin was the color of moonlight and had the sinful feeling of creamy satin. On her head were long luxurious locks of golden curls that came down past her shoulders. She looked around, seeing, but unseeing. Lost in a world that she didn't seem to recognize or know.

"Momma, momma …" Lavender pulled on her skirt, hiding behind her leg. "Momma, it's a princess. It's a Princess!" She hissed at her quietly.

The young mother turned back to her girl. "Hush now Lavender." She chastised lightly.

But she couldn't argue with her little girl. The young woman before them was blindingly beautiful, somehow, shamefully, even more enchanting in her deep sorrow and glassy green eyes. But it was what she was wearing. It was an evening gown made of a shining silvery silk that came off her creamy bare shoulders. It looked to have cost a fortune, and it had, four years ago. She had a matching choker on her pale supple throat. It was a timeless gown, designed personally to fit a teenage girl in love, and meant to impress and enchant one young man in particular. It hadn't been worn since the first time, when she thought her whole world was over. If she only knew then, what she did now, she might never have cried all her tears and saved them for tonight.

"Is there something you're looking for, luv?" Sally asked the girl.

Snapping her head around, the out of place beauty stared at the woman as if she was speaking in tongues. She seemed lost in a haze, a fog that had settled in her own mind. It was as if Sally was speaking in a wind tunnel to the girl. For a moment the mother thought that her neighbor could've been a foreigner by the way she didn't comprehend her speech, or by the way that the air raid siren seemed to signal for her to dress up like she was going for a grand dinner at Downton Abbey.

"Momma, it's the princess from the posters!" Lavender exclaimed.

"Hush, darling!" She didn't listen to what her little girl said. But the young woman seemed too, and something about Lavender's words snapped her from her stupor for a moment.

She blinked her sad eyes. "Excuse me, ma'am." Her voice came out so fine, so posh, it almost made Sally want to curtsy. She was gentle, polite, but the sorrow nearly broke your heart. Her soft smile only made it worse. "I was wondering if the evening post has come to collect the letters." She asked.

The mother with a sleeping babe in one arm, little girl clutching her skirt, and everything they needed to survive in their hands seemed baffled by the question. The air raid siren was going off, the Germans were coming, and she was wondering if the post was coming? She wasn't a foreigner ...

She was just mad.

"Miss, it's nearly midnight!" She said with a deeply worried frown.

The concept of time seemed to escape the lovely girl in front of her. But eventually she frowned and nodded slowly. "Oh, of course …" She drew away. It seemed she didn't quite grasp the sentence, but knew from her tone and look that it wasn't, in fact, coming tonight … coming back period.

He wasn't coming back for her either.

Sally shifted her sleeping son from one arm to the other. "Miss, the siren is going off. You should really get to a shelter … Miss, Germans!" She tried to caution. But the girl retreated back to her candle lit flat without hearing her. The sound of Ivo Novello echoed softly from a record player.

"Thank you." She smiled brokenly as she slipped back inside.

A leather clad glove shot out from the mother and took ahold of the girl's slim hand. She hadn't known why, but she had dropped her suitcase and reached for her. Sally Jones had never seen a girl so terribly broken, so deeply in pain that she had seemed to cease to be. She had always heard, but never believed, that someone could die of a broken heart. But then she saw how possible it was within the flickering flame of life going out inside this girl.

The young woman turned and stared at the hand grasping her. Just like words and human interaction, touch was just as foreign as anything else tonight. Sally knew she had to go, that there were much more important things, like keeping these babes safe. But whither it was the Christian part of her, or just the little girl still inside. But she simply couldn't just abandon a beautiful princess, like her to sit by and let a Nazi bomb claim her. Let her mourn, let her brood, let her find love again. But it wasn't right to die like this, let them Germans do her in.

"Miss …" She was becoming anxious as the sirens grew louder, the sound of anti-aircraft guns roaring in the distance. She turned toward where they should've been long past by now, before turning back to the girl. "Are you alright, luv?" She asked sympathetically, heart tearing out of her chest with just one glance.

There was a long pause between them. The young woman seemed blankly staring at her. "No ma'am." She finally answered. "No ma'am, and I'm afraid that I never will be again." A single tear fell down her pallid cheek in a slow poignant speed.

Sally's throat tightened and from the thunder in the distance she couldn't tell if it was guns or the sound of her heart crashing down in ruin. "Is there anything we can do, miss?" She found herself asking, taking the girl's hand heartedly.

Despite the danger and the sadness clouding the very light that this beauty should be admitting, she looked hopeful. "Hold him, ma'am …" She wasn't sure if she was referring to her sleeping boy, or the husband who helped create him. "Love him, on some sunny day, and don't let go." She nodded with all the love left in her that had been stored secretly inside her broken heart for ten lifetimes.

"You should go, ma'am." She nodded, wiping the tear. "I'm not so important." She looked to the two children in Sally's charge. Quietly, the mother nodded, her eyes glassy. Gently she let go of the blonde young woman's hand. They shared one last flicker of emotional connection. She had wanted to speak comforts and confidence to the teenage girl before her, but she couldn't find the words. She'd dare say that there would be no use in saving someone who looked like this girl.

Fore she'd not want to save herself.

"Come'on, babes, come'on … down to the basement!" Sally sniffled, herding the little girl, and picking up their suitcase. She looked over her shoulder to find the girl watching them leave. She wished she could make her reconsider, but there was just no time. Opening the staircase door, Sally Jones just prayed that she'd never know her young, too young, neighbor's heartbreak in this horrible war.

Lavender resisted her mother's ushering for just a moment. "Goodbye, Ms. Marigold!" She called down the hallway.

At the name that the little girl called, her mother almost swallowed her tongue. There was denial that she hadn't meant Marigold Crawley, the ballerina. She whirled around at the last moment in shock. All she saw was the tail end confirmation of a waving silhouette disappear behind a doorway and the echo of its door closing.

There was something laconically peaceful in the empty flat that was stilled. The contrast between the sound of anti-aircraft fire and explosion from their rounds against the tender sentimentality of Ivo Novello's closing piano notes was a clash of the peaceful past and the horrors of a present and future. The living room of the large loft was periodically lit by the air defense spotlights that shined below, spotting the gunners nearby. There was an expensive couch and cushioned sitting chairs that had been bought and paid for by an Aunt who thought that "The tastes have to be just right for two fashionable young women of consequence in this city." There were novels and a backlog of 'The sketch' magazines stacked neatly on the polished surfaces of their posh tables. Their maid had come earlier that morning. A river of white satin and lace was donned by a mannequin that sat by the large windows that carried a grand view of the city skyline and Fancy Square below. The backwash of the edges of search lights glimmered off the costume meant for the lead dancer in the ballet "Giselle" that was premiering tomorrow in London. The maid had set out the luggage, packed her things and had left the lids opened so that the owner might inspect and move it around as she seemed fit.

Even if the world was on fire, an Englishman would never think of changing his routine or inconveniencing another. And so there was a patriotic duty to every dancer to show up and preform for their majesty's and cabinet members. Even if there was no roof on the Metro Theater, she'd be expected to adjust the chorography around the ruins. There was something akin to the memories of the Titanic in the imagery of aristocrats and MP's waiting for death in their finery while the orchestra played a farewell and a single ballerina danced the final dance as the world ended around them. She had told herself that it was a very dignified way to go, a romantic and satisfying way to die. But Marigold Crawley was haunted by the simple question …

"What if it doesn't happen, what if I survive?"

Those were completely unacceptable terms.

They were expecting her early in the morning, the Duke of Marlborough even called ahead, made special arrangements so that she could get off duty early. Marigold's days were spent at Fighter Control, listening to the final moments of dying young men falling from the sky, screaming for their mothers till there was nothing but static. And her nights were spent dancing, losing herself in the passion, in the feeling of life flowing through her heart and soul. Some people couldn't imagine focusing on anything else but the death, every day, all day. Trying to talk to a young man in his final moments, blood smeared in his cockpit, trying to convince him that he could make it another twenty miles. And feel the brutal heartache when your words and pleas were wind in the screaming of the plane in a death dive as the Pilot passed out from blood loss. After months of it, there was still nothing harder than flipping the switch on the dashboard that alerted command that another pilot was dead.

Marigold wasn't like Sybbie. Her cousin, her sister, thought that she was entitled to be in the action. She was George's partner, her Tom Branson to his Lady Mary. There was nothing that could keep them apart, George needed her. It wasn't that she felt a swell of patriotism or purpose in this war. It was simply that they couldn't have a party without Sybil Branson. But Marigold had joined up, because, she felt that she could make a difference. Her father, her real father, had been killed in the 'Beer Hall Putsch' in 1923. These people who had taken away her chance to know the good man who loved her mother, who were now threatening everyone and everything she loved. Who were trying to kill the one man she loved above everyone else, every day. She couldn't have sat back at Downton with everyone else and read about it in the paper. So she manned the board and the radios by day and continued to dance at night.

When she had been assigned to the Yorkshire Air Shield from her posting at Bath, she had been furious. George seemed to be assigned, without fail, to the sectors were the fighting was at the heaviest at all times. Sybbie was there on the ground behind him almost since they joined up. But Marigold was considered a national treasure, a great cultural asset. She blamed Donk, she blamed Uncle Atticus, and the list went on. But she was taken from her duty station and sent to Sector 4. Where there was no action, no fighting. They had tried to sell it to her that she was contributing to the defense of her home. It was a good photo-op for the beautiful ballerina to be standing in front of the romantic manor house she was raised in, saluting in her uniform. But good optics or not, it made her feel like a coward.

She slept in a posh penthouse at night during the weekdays, she went home on the weekends to attend garden parties with her Granny and Mama, and slept in the bosom of family within the walls of Downton Abbey, where dinners and shoots still were the most stressful part of life. And she hadn't begrudged the wholesome break from the war she had spent two months in. But she couldn't hide the shame she felt sitting at a dinner party knowing that her best friends … the man she loved, could be dead at that very moment. Sleeping next to her mama at night on the weekends, she could only hear George's dying call of her name as a radio went to static. And then she was awoken by her Aunt Rose, Aunt Mary, Granny, Donk, and mama.

She had been shrieking for George in her sleep.

When she heard that the first squadron to be assigned, temporally, to their sector was Rogue Squadron, Marigold wept in joy. "Thank god …" she had whispered in the women's toilets. The squadron had been torn to bits after months of continuous fighting, and was well below half-strength. There was something to be said, something to be complained, that the Air Ministry had used up their foreign volunteers as 'shock troops' rather than use British squadrons in the intense fighting.

Today had been just like any day. Radar stations tracking bird flocks out of boredom, the girl's gossiping at the break room. The old colonel was walking stalwartly through the control room, wiping the consoles with a handkerchief in surprise inspection. Marigold had a half-day. She had special orders to be in London in the morning, so that she could rehearse for the night's performance. The other girl's would usually be jealous, but they worried for her. It seemed cruel to force her to perform under life and death in fate's finger snap. But the truth, beyond the excuse that Marigold was in love with dancing, was that for once she wasn't being coddled or treated like her _Granny's dolly_. She wasn't her Aunt Mary, the ballerina didn't enjoy being fawned over like a diva. She had learned that in a world of death and fear, it was just as important to give someone the joy of her joy in what she did, as it was manning the radios in Bath. If she could just make one person forget their troubles in a performance, than she was still making a difference.

The girls were gossiping about men, when they asked about the mystery man, this nameless 'someone' of Marigold's dreams that she was always thinking about as she drifted off into space. Ironically, it was in the same breath as they asked if their "new best friend" could introduce them to George Crawley, the daring and audacious young pilot every girl, common to royal, was reading about in the newspapers.

The young ballerina had found herself smirking, caught up in the private irony of their lives. George and Marigold could have any woman and man in Britain. And for Marigold, there had been a few chaps in Oxford, a couple of weekends in the country that had almost had her in the last four years. But after their night in the pub on George's birthday, dancing together till there was no music left in the world, she knew that there was no one else. They could've had anyone else in the world … But they both chose torment than spending a moment considering a happy life of giving up the very memory of one another.

But then the whole world turned upside down in a matter of a few seconds. The alarms were sounding, flocks of birds where actually German bomber groups out of Scandinavia. Station managers were fleeing to the phones, screaming in desperation for the two depleted squadrons to scramble immediately. Marigold within the chaos was terrified, enraged, and desperate, all in a mask of duty. They had brought them, brought him, here to rest! For just a night they had been safe, Uncle Atticus, Sybbie … and George, George had been safe! Nothing ever happened in their sector, and now, now that Marigold had a piece of mind, they were in danger all over again. And it was the worst kind of danger they had ever faced.

They were outnumbered, out gunned, and everything they held dear facing annihilation by Nazi firebomb. It was unspoken in the control room that every young man who had valiantly jumped into a plane that morning was flying to his doom. All they could hope for was to limit the damage to Ripon and the Grantham countryside by taking as many Nazis with them as possible. Marigold was on the verge of tears at her station upon hearing the old colonel, with a grave look on his face, recite 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' as he looked on the board. It was twelve against sixty. Just the escort alone outnumbered Rogue Squadron two-to-one. Command reported, even before the battled commenced, the odds were that there would be no RAF survivors.

She had felt so helpless sitting by the radio, listening to the common chatter of pilots, young men barely out of grade school. There were many people with glassy looks in their eyes today, even the staunchest gentlemen by the phones. But no one said a word, only closed their eyes in guilt and shame at the laughter and jokes being shared between the pilots. Command had not informed the squadron of the enemy numbers, fearing that they'd run or even refuse to take off if they knew. The ballerina's hand reached for the com so many times, desperate to radio Rogue One to run, run far away. It wasn't right, they were going to kill those young men, they were going to kill George, just to tell the War Ministry that they 'attempted' to do something to save the rural Yorkshire industry. The only thing that kept her from mutiny was that it was Downton, it was home, which was under the barrel of the Nazi guns. But, even if she warned George, and even if it had been hundred-to-one …

Her beloved still wouldn't yield.

It was the one thing that she had tried to convey to everyone tonight. But the written word could not aptly portray all the feelings that she felt. There was so many turn of phrases within the English language that could've been her friend, but there was only one that came to mind as she had sat at her desk. She owed them, all of their loved ones, so much more of an explanation about the reasons and the tragedies of their folly as fate's fools. But there was only one thing that had come to mind as she wrote. And that was the word 'empty'.

She felt so empty, a great nothingness inside her where the girl Marigold Drewe Crawley had been. Sometimes she wondered if that girl had even existed at all, or if she was just a figment of her shamed and ruined mama's imagination. Had not Marigold Drewe died five years ago? Didn't she cease to exist when her future, her very universe, was stolen from her? She was a fish taken out of water, a plant pushed into the sun for too long without sustenance. Marigold had shriveled up and died long ago, and only now did she understand that she was not living at all. All the beauty, all the grace that was so deftly chronicled in the papers, in her mama and papa's magazine … did they not see the pathetic, soulless creature in front of them?

The creature in such grand costumes and perfectly painted on face, was voiceless, her prideful feet felt like they were dancing on knifes with every step. Her life force was sustained by the little rays of hope, of the illusion of dead dreams. She fed off the hope that her prince would notice her, love her as he once did in her other form. Even in her darkness, her undead state, Marigold had such mad hope that something would change. She'd pray sometimes in her head in the darkest moments that this world would be burnt away. She hoped that the Nazis would raise it all to the ground. That way there would be no one, no one to tell them that they couldn't be together. So that there would be no one who would know, who would remember what they had been to one another. She had felt ashamed afterward, but the wishing did not die with her shameful head shake. But it didn't matter anymore. Because they had done it, they had burned the world down.

But they had taken George with it.

How lonely, how broken she was to be the only one who knew that he was dead, the he was gone. The phone had been ringing for hours. She knew it was Sybbie, knew it was a girl who waited for a fighter, for a pilot to come back, that never had. What it must have been like to stand there and wait all afternoon, all night and not one of them to come home. It was why she couldn't talk to her, to break the heart of someone she loved so much. Sybbie would want to know if Marigold could tell her what had happened to George, if she had heard anything. What the girl had heard was everything she had ever wanted too and a short while later, everything she didn't.

In the silent control room, George had come over the loud speaker just before battle. He had known she was there, listening. So he confirmed everything, a lifetime's worth of pain and longing, in a simple jovial sentence. She knew that he was just trying to make her smile. But under the horrid looks of guilt and sorrow, Marigold burst into tears. She had cried alone as the coms burst into chaos. Pilots were seeing the wall of enemy aircraft, and immediately calling for emergency reinforcements, reinforcements that would never come. But they were not receiving word back from the station manager. He was sobbing in his palms.

The Ministry had killed those young men today, and they had all contributed.

During the battle, Judy, Marigold's break room mate, pulled her over to her station. She plugged in Marigold's headphones in her second jack. Together, holding hands, they sat and listened to George's radio feed. He was foul mouthed, brash, arrogant, valiant, gallant, and heroic. He was everything that Sybbie described and Marigold imagined he was in battle. And there had been hope, a cruel confidence toward the end of the engagement. Many young men died on the fields of the County of Grantham that day, including her Uncle Atticus. She had been shook to her very core, thinking of her bright and bubbly Aunt Rose who was so excited to see him this weekend. But in the end the German's were on the run and George was still flying. All he had to do was go back to the airfield. Had he, he would've found Sybbie and Marigold waiting for him. He and his men had done nearly the impossible that afternoon, and every newspaper on either side of the Atlantic would report it. But the reunion, the small, costly, victory at the airdrome was never to be.

A commuter train was in trouble, ME 109s were attacking it. And it wasn't in George Crawley's blood, in the man she loved, to run from people in trouble. Marigold had never met her Uncle Matthew, but she'd lay a curse upon his bones for making his own son strive to be as selfless as he had been. George and his wingman had swooped in to save the day. Marigold, the woman he had loved so much, had been there the whole time, unknown to him. She had been there to hear his last words. There had been a punch of glass, a growl of pain, and then the radio cut off.

Someone had begun screaming George name, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out who it might have been. Then when she felt the Colonel, Judy, and Katherine holding onto her, she realized that it had been her. She had grabbed the com and was shrieking for him desperately the moment his radio had cut out. She had heard enough cries in the skies over England to know when death had claimed a pilot. And she knew from the moment the radio was dead that she'd never see George again.

Somewhere he'd have a plaque in the village of Downton, like his father, like their Aunt Sybil. It would be a mossy, grimy thing, which would be forgotten, just meaningless words in a few short decades. But for Marigold, tomorrow, maybe the next day, there would be a dozen headlines in newspapers all around the world. There would be candle light vigils, thousands of heartbroken little girls who grew up with her in Lady Edith's stories. It would be a death that would stay in the cultural zeitgeist forever. It seemed wrong, so terribly wrong, to think that the public would see George's death as something gallant but unavoidable and Marigold's to be a great national tragedy. But there were no words to portray it to their family except to tell the truth to them in her final letter. Five years had been too long, but she could never bear another eighty, much less another hour. She was so sorry to everyone they'd hurt …

But she couldn't live without him.

" _Somewhere there's another land  
different from this world below,  
far more mercifully planned  
than the cruel place we know.  
Innocence and peace are there-  
all is good that is desired.  
Faces there are always fair;  
love grows never old nor tired."_

Marigold stuffed the letter, writing Lady Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, on the envelope. The record player clicked and the sentimental piano and gilded voice of Ivo Novello began to echo amongst the angry buzzing of German plane engines. In the background fireballs glowed in the distance, lighting the posh flat's stillness. A few seconds later a violent shutter shook the living room. There was a white dusting of powder misted in clouds from above, slowly falling to the wooden floors. The soft glows of flames were reflected off the polished surfaces of the expensive furniture. But the girl didn't seem to notice as she licked the envelope.

She figured that eventually someone would find her letter.

Slowly she blew out the candle light at her desk. The fires of judgment day, the very results, and the very consequence of the purest form of human hatred was used by Marigold to light her way across Sybbie and her flat. The room shook violently, and Novello skipped, while the top floors of a tall building of ancient stone collapsed on the streets below. The sound of women and children screaming, and the artillery fire intensifying didn't make the girl flinch. The firelight made the silvery gown shimmer in an ethereal light while it floated around her pale ankles as she padded gracefully to the dining room table.

" _We shall never find that lovely  
land of might-have-been.  
I can never be your king nor  
you can be my queen.  
Days may pass and years may pass  
and seas may lie between-  
We shall never find that lovely  
land of might-have-been."_

On Eagle Day, while the RAF barely held on, the command center at Bath had been hit twice. There had been confusion, rumors on the wire from damaged radar stations. There had been so many things falling from the sky that day, bombs, planes, and debris. There had been reports that the RAF was finished, and that the Germans were landing Paratroopers. Believing the reports, the Bath station commander went to the armory and passed out revolvers to every person in uniform. It didn't matter if they were male, female, old or young. They'd fight them to the last. Luckily the reports were false, luckily the RAF had held out one last time, and luckily Marigold had never returned the gun they gave her.

The ballerina took the large weapon. She felt the weight of metal, chemicals, and death in her hand. She let out a shaky breath of sorrow and defeat as the flat shook again. The fountain in the square outside had been struck by debris, smashing the statue at the center. The water shot up like a geyser into the air. The pressure began dosing other fires, but the weight and force of the spray began collapsing more of the damaged buildings. Marigold watched the chaos for a moment longer, and then closed her eyes. She weighed the gun in her hand again, before she moved on from the window.

" _Sometimes on the rarest nights  
comes the vision calm and clear,  
gleaming with unearthly lights  
on our path of doubt and fear.  
Winds from that far land are blown, whispering with secret breath-  
hope that plays a tune alone,  
love that conquers pain and death."_

There was never a straighter posture, a more regal look to be found in a perfect position as the girl who sat on her couch. She placed the gun on her lap and sat very still, looking around at the setting of her final moments. The world was falling apart behind her as she sat in a room filled with expensive things bought for her. Her ballet costume glowed in the reflection of firelight below as did the glossy covers of her mother's magazine. In one, perfect, moment she saw the rest of her life.

Her career as a prima ballerina, till someone younger, more talented, came along and ousted her. She saw herself as a choreographer for the next twenty years, grinding at 'The Sketch' for another thirty. Maybe there was a family, children, and a safer world. Or maybe in a year's time she'd be dancing for Hitler, Himmler, Goering, the men who killed the man she loved. She'd be dancing for their pleasure, surrender herself as a Nazi prize in order to protect her family. Whither it was sixty years of peace, or a year of gilded slavery, in a world without George she'd still find herself siting on this couch with a revolver in her lap.

She nodded as a single tear began to fall. There was no way around it. There was no way through it. She loved him too much. He was a part of her and she was a part of him. There could not possibly be one without the other. It was just impossible for her to live, to survive this cruel world coming apart at the seams without George, even if he lived forever in arms-length for the rest of her life. She wished that she could be as strong as her twice widowed Aunt Mary, her devoted Uncle Tom. She wished she was even a fraction as strong as Lady Edith. Her mama had waited for Marigold's father for three years before learning his fate, and had waited by her husband's side for eight years, hoping he'd wake up from his coma. None of the people who helped raise her, who had lost the loves of their lives, had once thought of killing themselves.

But they couldn't understand Marigold and George.

Those people she loved, they had met their loves when they were grown. They had lives before their soul mates, lives that they transformed and changed to be with their lovers. But Marigold didn't know anything else but to love George. He had always been a part of her life, she had always, always, loved him. There wasn't a day in her existing memory in which she hadn't loved him. He was her oxygen. He was the rain, the sunrays that made her grow. Even apart all these long years, to know that he was still out there, thinking of her, made her life of bullies and envious harpies bearable. To know that he was no more was to say that she was no more as well, that she might as well have been dead too.

Somewhere out there in the fissures and twisting complexity of the universe that surrounded them, there was a time and place that was forever trapped in a moment of time. There, in a small town cantina on the Texas and Mexican border. A young man was leaning against a bar. He was smirking at what a young, dark skinned, youth with a feather in long hair was saying. The young man talking to the native Indian boy had a crumpled outback fedora over grown out raven curls. Over his Henley shirt and navy blue scarf was a ragged double breasted jacket made of the darkest brown corduroy that was mended by Lady's Maid stitches. He wore black slacks held up by a belt with a Webley revolver on its back hip and tucked into worn boots. The two racers who had won first and second place in the big horse race that evening where conversing in rustic Spanish.

There was mariachi music echoing loudly through the establishment. Obnoxious laughter from parties of racers, sponsors, gamblers, ranchers, and hookers reverberated. Mexican women in floral shirts wondered table to table selling roses for the "Cowboys" to give to prostitute's to help 'sweet talk' their rates down. Booze was poured, Cigars were being lit, and poker games were getting interesting, but all eyes fell on the girl as she passed. The young racer and the Indian boy's laughter was the only thing audible when the beautiful ballerina stopped.

She could still see George's face turn. He had a passing interest at some rich oilman's daughter, moving to overlook her, when he stopped. His expression changed from disinterested to completely breathless. The girl wore a white satin blouse, blue polyester skirt, and matching jacket and hat with a silver feather in it. Her golden tresses were brushed out and curled perfectly against her shoulder. She was classy, elegant, and beautiful beyond words. But it was the way she was looking at the ruggedly dressed young man. There was nothing but relief, joy, and all the love in the world just to see him alive and smiling. It had been two years of no word from him, no one knowing if he was alive or dead. In that time, she had grown up, and in her style, in her radiance …

He could see the fresh young dancer who he thought would be his wife one day.

The whole cantina watched the two stare at one another for a long time. Slowly, shock and love turned to teary smiles in one another's presence. George saying her name was all she had wanted to hear since he had left her standing on a hotel balcony in New Orleans. Their kiss, while everyone else was asleep, had been both their first and last, as he rode away and disappeared in the early morning fog. Her name on his lips she took as a sign for her to go to him. She sprinted as he moved toward her. They crushed together when she leapt into his arms. Marigold's feet never touched the ground as they laughed, cried, and held one another. They hadn't cared that everyone was watching them, people that had thought George Crawley a dangerous fighter, not to be trifled with. They watched him hoist the beauty off her feet and spin her around in joy.

It was the happiest that both Marigold and George had ever been in their entire lives. Then, they had thought, in that moment, that there would be a day that they'd be married. That one day there was a happy ending for the exiled drifter and the bullied ballerina, together. Someday they'd walk hand in hand through the double doors of Downton Abbey and finally have a home that they both belonged in.

"These violent delights have violent ends. And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss consume: long love doth so; too swift arrives as tardy as too slow."

The barrel was cold against the young woman's temple, as she held unto her most precious and cherished memory in her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears falling freely, as she drew the hammer back on the revolver. She replayed the moment, the happiness, the love, and the dreams of a future over and over again, like a visual mantra.

"O happy dagger, this is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die!" She whispered in a sob. It was a pleading reprieve, a prayer to god or whoever watched over her to release her from this cruel comedy that she was a player in.

Her finger touched the trigger.

" _Shall we ever find that lovely  
land of might-have-been?  
Will I ever be your king or you  
at last my queen?  
Days may pass and years may pass  
and seas may lie between-  
Shall we ever find that lovely  
land of might-have-been?"_

There was a disturbance that furrowed her brow. In the distance and growing louder was an obnoxious whistling noise. She wondered, at first, why she had left the tea on the kettle in the kitchen. But then it grew louder and louder, till it shook the flat to its very core. It was so loud and violent that she had thought that it was a divine figure coming down to answer her prayer.

And when the bomb exploded across the street, maybe it had.

The force of the blast blew out her windows, every last one of them. Her wall exploded, sending paper, paneling, and bricks flying like little stone bits of death. It hit with the force of a dozen shotgun blasts. Everything in the living room and kitchen was ripped to pieces. The couch she sat on was lifted over end and she was spilled to the ground violently, crashing over her coffee table. Sybbie's radio exploded in the onslaught of debris, like it had been blasted by both barrels of a shotgun. The entire posh penthouse was completely eviscerated and destroyed. Where the ballet costume for the final act of "Giselle" sat, the floor and wall had been completely ripped away. It now looked down on the sidewalk and cobbled street below.

In a mess of blood, tangled golden tresses, and ripped evening gown, Marigold lay unmoving under her sofa.

When she awoke, there was a deep darkness all around her. She felt a terrible sharp pain in her side. But her life remained in every shallow, pained, breath she took. A rage filled her lungs. It was a fire of determination, of madness that drove her. They had taken her dreams, her future, and her love. They had taken her George from her. They wouldn't take this as well, this one choice left to her. She crawled through the ruin, the remainder of her empty life to the glimmering piece of metal in the firelight's glow.

She reached out in the cold outside air that filtered through her destroyed penthouse. With growls, she desperately pulled herself toward her instrument of salvation in the distance. New tears were in her eye as she felt the wooden handle in her hand. But when she pulled it out from under the table she paused.

"No …!" She whispered hoarsely. "No, no … please god … oh no!" She sobbed with a defeated shake of her head. Curled up in pain and sorrow, Marigold Crawley cried within the flaming ruins of an empty life. While, in her hand, lay the cruelest joke of all.

It was two pieces of a broken revolver.

* * *

It was coming down in sheets in the pitch darkness that surrounded a tall manor house filled with shadows and ghosts of every perceived definition to the human mind and spirit. An earthly glow from candle light gave the old Gothic spires a hue that dimly lit the surroundings like a fading beacon at sea. It drew all life toward it on the dangerous and dark evening. It was a siren on the rocks whose song drew the ships too close. Or it had been a haunted castle, where a cursed beast lurks in the shadows of the dry relief it offers. In the intense flashes of lighting and the powerful claps of thunder that shook the ground, the molding stone looked to rot, and it's darkened shaped looked sinister on the horizon. It was an old relic of a past that continued on through culture and tradition, more than want or practicality.

Downton Abbey was a lifeless shell of what was and never will be again. The majesty and grandeur of the past seemed to have faded away, supplanted by deep melancholy and longing that overcame her admirers. They talk of it as they do an aged beauty queen, hobbling on a walker, the boys at the pub telling stories as she walked by the window. "A great lass, she used be …" they watch her with sympathetic shakes of the head. "In her day, she had all'em young girl these days beat … don't make'em like that no more, do they?" They'd say while giving her a toast.

The great estate no longer held the favor of contemporary talk. Instead, it slowly sank into the nostalgia of the long rosy yesterdays. A great sickness of the heart and soul lay on the great house. And in its old age there was a cease of caring, a truth that knew no decorum or manner to its halls and outward appearance. It's rotted and withering look, reflected the malevolent spirit and the twisting sorrow that filled its aging and ruining halls.

From the back patio, where the old smoke house door rapped against the cracking stone in the violent storm, the age seemed more prominent. Vines and ivy snaked out from the unattended garden, its spade shaped leaves and moist green cables crawled over brick floor and rusted tool left behind. Its thick snares wrapped up columns and just hooked the warped wooden bench of the work table. Despite being occupied everyday by the comings and goings of the remaining staff, the invasion seemed unacknowledged as it slowly claimed the downstairs dwellings. It was as if the entire manor was enchanted by an evil spell, the workers, the very lives that dwelled here were but ghosts of themselves. They were here, but not here, repeating their tasks over and over again as the years melted one to the other.

It was as if time itself had no meaning to the living while it warped everything else.

In a cloud of cigarette smoke, Lady Rachel Aldridge felt as if she were trapped in a Gothic fairy tale. The teenage girl's tear stained crystal eyes looked out at the pitch black. She could hear the ricketing and tinkle of the fat raindrops on the aluminum, the splats on wood, and the rustle on the vine and ivy. But she couldn't see anything. It was perfect, a perfect setting for how she felt in her broken heart. There was a storm inside her, but she couldn't see anything past the darkness. She could just hear the sorrow, feel its spray on her fair skin, but there was nothing inside … nothing. Her Daddy was dead.

She inhaled a draft of smoke and held it in her lungs as she watched lightning flash, her surroundings lit as if it were noon. Strange and horrible shadows took the gruesome shapes that haunted her mind. All of these dark figures surrounding her, guards to keep her in these ruins. Her eyes watered and her lungs burned, but she allowed the pain to prosiest. All the time wondering if that was how her father felt while he fell from the sky. Finally with a sobbed sputter she let it all out in a wet haze of coughs. But when she found sweet relief in the pure, country air, she felt all the worse. Lord Sinderby would never taste such sweetness again. In her pain and sorrow she'd curse the sky. The girl felt, in her sudden madness, that she would rejoice if the hateful lightning and powerful thunder would tear asunder the blue yonder so that it never again would be hospitable to a pilot, nor would anyone forget the day Atticus Aldridge died.

Let it be the last sunny day for everyone, not just her.

But her anger cooled by the watery tears of feeling the hole in her heart. It had been a black day for everyone, and she had felt it all so strongly. It wasn't just her daddy, it was George, and it had been sitting in a dark room listening to her little brother crying into her mommy's chest as her Grandmamma held her hand. It was everything she couldn't stand to be around anymore. In her sorrow and confusion, she would do anything to leave this place behind. She'd run away from this cursed castle and this pain to the very edges of the world, where they couldn't find her. For the first time in her life she was afraid and there wasn't a champion to bring true comfort. Things would change, and in her heart she knew that everything was already different.

There was never a girl who could claim the honesty to the phrase "beloved mama" than Rachel. But the girl was old enough to remember San Sochi. She had been old enough to remember George, shuffling home tiredly, glaring at his Aunt Rose. Her mommy apologizing with light-hearted giggles while he slowly trudged into the kitchen. There was a clatter of pots and pans and finally, after half an hour they could eat. She remembered her daddy sitting in the bathroom with her, reading a child rearing book about toilet training, while mommy picked her fingernails outside, apologizing to George who was scrubbing the ballroom floor where Rachel had been constitutionalizing for her 'evacuations' for months. Lady Rose was supposed to have been reading the book about 'potty training' but got bored after the second chapter. It was her lovely mommy who was putting on beautiful evening gowns, while her daddy fed baby Hugh, and a tired George told the young girl sternly to "eat your food" as they sat in the giant lobby of the kitchen. The paper boy fell asleep while waiting for the pretty little girl to finish her vegetables so she can leave the table. Rachel was old enough to remember the entire year in which Mommy was completely mute in trauma after they left that place in the night.

Lady Rose Aldridge was a little and a teenage girl's dream companion. Rachel once thought her mother must have been a fairy tale princess. She certainly looked the part, and dressed it as well. The ease in which Lady Rose could be loved was like breathing to someone so young. She was beautiful and perfect in the eyes of a little girl, she shared in fashion and make up, teaching her all the grown up things that she idolized about her pretty mama. As a teenager, her mother is an idol to be strived for. She had the eye and ear for fashion and music. She was disproportionately lacks when it came to rules, giving Rachel a sort of freedom that made her father cringe and contend with. The young mother had just the way of knowing how to talk to her, that made her feel like she was a good friend, Rachel's best friend …

But after today Rachel came to realize that Lady Rose Aldridge, now Dowager Countess of Sinderby, was not a responsible mother.

Her mama tried too hard to be her friend, because, she had spent years being a stranger. Rachel couldn't remember her Mama between her princess faze and her recent memory, because she was not a part of their lives between then. After San Sochi, mommy and daddy split up. Lady Rose had a breakdown and spent years recovering from it. While her mama was hidden away at Downton Abbey, Rachel and her little brother lived with their father at her other grandparent's home. There, they had been helpfully raised around a loving Granny and a very stern, but fair, grandfather. Her mama was someone she had fond memories of, but never saw, and longed to be reunited with. How bitterly her daddy brooded for her in all the long years without her. And when she finally arrived at their doorway, driven there by Sybbie and her Grandmamma Cora, there had never been a happier moment in all of their lives. And Rachel had been content with her unimpeachable love and companionship, but things were different now. Daddy was gone. George was missing, believed to be dead as well. Lady Rose had always crumbled under responsibility. If she collapsed who was gonna be there for Hugh …

Who was gonna be there for her?

"Oh, daddy …!" She said quietly with a sputtered cloud of smoke as she looked into the abyss. "What am I gonna do?!" She asked, feeling a weight of responsibility fall upon her. It was so sudden, so heavy that she thought it would pin her to the floor. It crushed her under the weight, till she could not breathe, and couldn't think … couldn't think of anything about how much she needed her father, wanted her father. It wasn't fair for him to do this to her, to leave her to hold everything up, when she wanted to curl up in the dark and cry herself.

Suddenly there was a rattle of a tin next to her. She turned her head to find a tin of mints being offered. She was surprised for a moment by the disembodied hand. Then in a flash of lightning she found that it belonged to a boy that was her peer. The world stopped spinning for just a hairs breath and she was captured in his father's eyes. All her pain, all her sorrow, the weight of responsibility seemed to go away in a steadiness of a longing gaze that fell over her.

John Bates Jr. was a boy that was the quiet dream of every girl in the village of Downton. He had his mother's look, with a head full of blonde hair, kept to trim by her conservative standards. But there was a nobility and gallantry of an ancient knight within the eyes his father had given him. There was a light that surrounded the young boy. Every breath he took was blessed, a soul born to the world as two tormented lover's happy ending, their victory in a life. And the loving home he was raised in bred a heart that knew only kindness, courage, and right. The wholesome lad with an angel's face was a crutch that was willing to take the young debutante's weight, longing just to be close to her.

Since Lady Rachel had moved into Downton Abbey with her mama and little brother, the young man's eyes had ever haunted her steps. He had been in love since the day she had asked him to take her luggage, mistakenly thinking that he had worked in the household. He had come to visit his mother and father after the last day of school before summer break. But he didn't correct her at just the privilege to see her in silk sundress, spring bonnet, lace gloves, and wavy blond locks. His school master, Mr. Mosley, had looked completely confused as he followed the girl up the stairs. And the old, part-time, footman might have sold him out, had JJ not shot the old family friend a look saying that he'd murder him for any betrayal. He was completely in love by the time he had hauled up the last suitcase, dumping it on her bed, and watching her run a brush through her stylish golden locks luxuriously. She had him at "That'll be all, thank you …" while giving him a heavenly smile from the reflection in her mirror.

That afternoon, he bothered Mrs. Patmore about who the girl was and if it was possible for angel's to have names. After being chased out of the kitchens with a towel, he went to his mother and father in the servant's hall and asked if it was possible if the house needed a summertime footman. Anna and Bates considered it out of the question. They were faithful servants, who admired and respected the friendships that tied them to the people they served. But they swore they'd never see either their boy or little girl work in this house, or any household. However, overhearing their rejections over a smoke, Thomas Barrow saw one more way to harmlessly vex his longtime rivals. He secretly informed the younger Mr. Bates that there might be some work available, to allow him to discuss it with his Lordship and Lady Mary.

It was his machinations that led to a convention of argument and strife in the main library that would've shocked Mr. Carson had he been there. JJ Bates told Lord Grantham and Lady Mary that he just wanted "some money of his own" as he had rehearsed earlier that day. Anna had bitterly forbid it, her temper held in check by a very calm but disapproving Mr. Bates. Lady Mary didn't see the harm in it, while his Lordship was more sympathetic to his longtime friend's plight. There were accusations against Mr. Barrow, which Lord Grantham was willing to consider, while the dapper man used Lady Mary's aloof support as a shield. All the while JJ voiced his disapproval of his own decisions, as nearly 'a man grown', being trampled on.

Then all the fighting stopped when Lady Rachel entered the room with a knock. She asked her Aunt Mary and Grandpapa when the dressing gong was rung at Downton. Before she left, the teenage queen paid a hello and a 'well done' for the splendid job JJ had done bringing her things safely to her room. As she left, all the eyes fell on the love stricken boy who watched her steps out the room longingly and stared after her invisible silhouette long since she was gone. A grinning Mary turned to a smirking Lord Grantham, while Anna looked confounded going from her boy to where Rachel had disappeared. Mr. Bates sighed heavily rubbing his forehead. He always considered himself a daddy of a little boy, but today he saw himself now the father of a young man in love. He left the decision to Lord Grantham and Lady Mary. While they had all cleared out to change for dinner, Mary announced to the teenage boy, with a smirk …

"Oh, I'm sure we'll find something for you to do."

He had spent the rest of the summer polishing silver, serving luncheons, seeing to guests, and many other laborious tasks that Mr. Barrow and Mr. Carson put to him. But he did everything he was told, just for the privilege of serving the dinners and drawing room afterward. It gave him a chance to see Lady Rachel at least once a day. He admired her most beautiful gowns and worshiped her from afar. Slowly they had become familiar with one another, his moment of joy coming from just the slightest eye contact as he lowered the tray so she might serve herself. The slightest smile, the spoken word to him, and just a shared glance was all that made a hard day into perfection. He was devoted to her, driven by a passion just to be near this slender figure whose perfection in his eyes was of the likeness carved into ancient Grecian urns.

Now, after all the action of the day and a summer of longing, JJ Bates couldn't imagine leaving the girl to herself for a moment. No one should face their darkest sorrow on their own, especially an angel. He had never felt more attached to her, never more protective than to come into the dark, cold, night to find her crying, suffering in the pitch black. Her powder blue evening gown sparkled in the dim, and the ember of her midnight cigarette glowed off the pearly elbow glove that gripped it. Her faire face was awash with broken tears.

They stared for a long pause of emotion. A connection, a bond forged in a summer of smiles, longing stares, and a flash of an impossible future as they lay in bed at night. It was all in a loaded moment of an offering of mints. After an awkward realization, JJ flinched at the frozen parties that they had become.

"Uh …" He drew out. "Her Ladyship, your Grandmother, that is, would kill you, if she knew you were out here having a smoke." JJ cursed himself the moment it left his mouth. Her father had just died, and he was trying to trivialize it with something as meaningless as Lady Grantham catching her granddaughter smoking.

But to the visible hesitation the girl smiled softly in her tears. Sniffling, she took one final lasting draft of her cigarette, before she flicked it in a nearby puddle. She nodded, as she held her breath in, taking a mint from his tin.

"Quite right …" She coughed as the smoke puffed out of her mouth. When it was gone, she popped it in. They began to get lost in one another's eyes again, the light within the young man drawing her to him, a ship on rocky waters with a lighthouse to guide. In his sympathetic and love loran gaze she felt her sorrow recede for just a blessed second. Everything wholesome and good about John Jr., drew her to him. While all the broken sorrow and darkness swirling inside this lost teenage girl only made him want to love her deeper. It was the ghost of his mother's instincts in his father's impossibly large heart.

But before they came together, she broke away in a thunder clap that scrambled their instincts. When the boom rattled away, Rachel shuttered in sadness and the chill of the stormy English night. They both nervously chuckled at the pliable emotions of young love coursing in this moment of tragedy. With a hard sniffle Rachel wiped her eyes.

"You must think me, quite the mess." She sniffled through a broken little chuckle.

JJ smirked sadly. "If there was ever anyone who has an excuse tonight, it's you, m'lady." He said sincerely.

The compassion and love in his voice couldn't be missed, but he wasn't hiding it anymore. There was such a draw in her watery eyes as she crunched the mint in her mouth. She was standing in a rainstorm of discontent and heartbreak, and all she wanted to do was run to the warm shelter of all the unrequited feelings that she wanted to return.

"I …" She tried to say, but it came out in a sobbed squeak. She turned away from him and walked to the very edge of the covered patio. She was conflicted by the strong emotions of loss, responsibility, and social class. And yet all she wanted in that moment was standing there, as he had been standing there since she came to this place. Running to him wouldn't make her strong, would prove that she could crumble as easily as mommy. But she was just fifteen, why did she have to be the strong one?

Suddenly, she felt something warm fold over her near bare shoulders. JJ could only stand a few moments of watching her shiver, before he was compelled to do something. He removed his livery coat and placed it around the girl's shoulders. She let out a shaky sigh of contentment amongst her tears. She turned her head over a shoulder and nodded gratefully. There was nothing but gallant instinct in the way he rubbed the girl's arms, generating warmth.

"You didn't have to come down for dinner, M'Lady …" He consoled quietly as he rubbed. "Everyone would've understood." He nodded.

"I guess so …" She agreed staring out into the invisible storm around them. "But I couldn't bear sitting there all night, in the dark, thinking of daddy in that burning plane …" She broken down with a sob, covering her mouth with a silky hand.

Quickly, JJ took her in his strong arms. She turned her head into his embrace, nuzzling his chest with the side of her face. She sobbed quietly in his arms, using every bit of warmth and love the footman had to give, which was all. The young man buried his head into her shoulder, whispering comforts into the material of his coat. His eyes were squinched shut, trying to concentrate his very life force into the girl. For a longtime they stayed that way. And for just a few moments they weren't a daughter of a Count and Countess and the son of a Valet and Lady's Maid, they weren't a Lady and part-time footman. They were just two teenagers, enthralled in young love, holding one another against a world falling apart around them.

Eventually Rachel's fit of sorrow passed and she found the composure to face the next few minutes. Breathing in winded weariness of loss, she looked up to the young man with his nose buried into her shoulder. Feeling her glassy eyes, he opened his and turned. They were close now, closer than they had ever thought they could possibly be for someone like him and someone like her. But they didn't care, because, the world only knew of two beings.

And that was themselves alone.

However as their lips were about to touch, there was a painfully slow shrieking creak of the old door behind them. There was a sudden, sucking in of their guts into their backs, as their necks tensed. Quickly the two teenagers broke away, though still snuggled together. Their heads turned to a stalwart silhouette limping on a cane that stood at the doorway. Swallowing her mint, Lady Rachel slowly excused herself from the footman's arms. She walked to the edge of the porch and smiled at Mr. Bates.

"I'm sorry, M'Lady … I didn't know anyone was out here." John Bates's voice was made of a calm and controlled timber of kindness. His hawkish eyes raked over his son, his propriety never once breaking when he saw the looks exchanged between the two teenagers. "Her Ladyship was inquiring after you." He relayed with a sturdy posture.

Rachel nodded. "Was it Grandmamma or Mommy … Mama." She closed her eyes at the slip up and shook her head as she corrected it. She'd feel quite the fool in front of John and his father still referring to Lady Rose as "mommy" in front of them. Once again, she felt the relatively new sensation of having her in her life, and the old ways had not yet evolved.

Mr. Bates didn't blink or even react to the slip up. "I believe it is your mother, M'Lady." He replied. "And if you don't mind me saying, I believe it is where you are needed most at the moment." He placed his hand behind his back, respectful and gallant to the last.

There was a betrayal of clarity in the way the girl turned to the footman in his father's words. It seemed that it was a protest of the heart. She did not want to give up her escape, her own piece of mind in his embrace, to surrender to the dark sorrow that awaited her with Lady Rose and little Hugh. But she bowed her head as thunder rumbled dully in the long distance.

"You're right, of course, Bates." She said with a faltered strength.

She felt like a little girl playing house with the failed sense of dignity and grace to her straightening back and cold determination. She might as well have been trying on her mother's clothes for all the good it did her. But Mr. Bates stood at attention none the less. She gave parting eyes to John standing where she had left him. There was a longing and protest screaming in her gaze, but she thought of her father and surrendered to duty.

"M'Lady …"

She was about to pass the doorway into the servant's hall, when Mr. Bates's voice halted her. She turned to look at him. He was wordless, but cleared his throat, and motioned his eyes to her shoulders. She looked down and saw that she was still wearing JJ's livery coat. For a beat she caressed its sleeve, and there was a strange air in her hesitation that spoke to her not wanting to give it up at all. But she relented when Mr. Bates held his hand out to her.

"Right again, it seems … what a folly that could've been." She chuckled painfully, sniffling as she shed JJ's coat and handed it back to his father. She turned back one last time to the vested youth watching her and smiled sadly.

"Thank you …" She whispered in loving sincerity.

"Anytime." He smirked sympathetically.

Finally she entered the servant's hall and the young man followed her till his father shut the door behind her. There was a long silence as the youth stood in front of the closed door. He felt pained and empty, robbed of his one chance. With a shaky hand he touched the door and sighed. Suddenly, his father's hand held his coat out to him. His old soulful eyes seemed thoughtful, brooding, and steely as they stared at his boy.

John snatched the coat from his father. He felt an adolescent poke of petulant anger at the older man. She needed him. He felt like he was the only one who could comfort her. If she needed anyone else, she would've gone to them. But she hadn't, she was here, with him. And their moment was broken up by his father who was looking at him with an unreadable glance that John could only construe as what anyone else would think.

"I know what you're gonna say, Dad …" He growled defensively.

To the temper in his son's voice the older man made an amused noise and smirked slightly. "Do you?" He placed his cane in front of him, breathing softly from his noise with amusement.

"Of course I do …" JJ responded flippantly. "It's the same thing momma had been telling me all summer." He scoffed.

Anna Bates was the kindest and most generous soul that had ever worked and lived within Downton's halls. But she was also not without a brain, and had years of the hardest of life experiences. While in her younger years, when she was unattached by child rearing, she was willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. But motherhood, the tragic circumstances that plagued her and Mr. Bates, along with the dark histories that had haunted the Crawley household these last twenty years, had changed Mrs. Bates. Her son and daughter were precious to her, the most important things in the world. And she had known Lady Rose Aldridge, Countess of Sinderby, far too long to trust her with what was most important to the pretty Lady's Maid. Anna knew all too well what Lady Rose had been like as a teenage girl, and had little faith in her daughter to be any different.

Motherhood had intensified Anna Bates's prejudices toward the stately and beautiful Aldridge family. In fear for her love stupefied boy, she could hardly separate Lady Rachel from Lady Sinderby when she was young. To her, Rachel Aldridge was a flighty, selfish, and uncaring girl that was interested in John Jr. for his good looks and nature. There was no future for them, and the 'too pretty' girl would be content with that arrangement while leaving her boy with a broken heart. She had worked for Lady Mary nearly all her life and she knew what these high born ladies were like all too well.

John wouldn't hear a bad word about Lady Rachel. No matter how many times his mother hammered him at their own dinner table. And tonight he expected his silent father to carry on his mother's crusade against the girl. Mr. Bates had been silent in the matter, hearing both mother and son rant in opposition of one another both at dinner and in private. He had yet to have an opinion one way or the other. He had a son speaking of love. And a wife speaking of social divisions, and Lady Rachel not being a tenth as strong as what Lady Sybil and Master George had been at her age to 'carry off this affair'.

Bates would say that no one else living could be as strong as Lady Sybil and Master George, period. And he thanked god that their family wouldn't have to deal with the tragedies and wicked curse that had blackened both Aunt and look alike nephew's destinies. Mr. Bates spoke against both loved ones with calm reason. John hadn't had one conversation with this Lady Rachel, and preached caution in his devotion. While, he reminded the sweetness and kindness in Lady Rose's heart that was shown to Anna at Duneagle. The girl didn't have to teach Anna how to reel dance, and she didn't have to give Mr. Bates his fondest memory of his beloved wife.

Thunder rolled after a violent fork of lightning danced across the heavy clouds. The shadowy strobe created visible objects of the imagination in its flash. The crippled old soldier watched over his son as he looked on with a troubled mind.

"You're gonna tell me that there's no future. I'm the son of a Valet and Lady's Maid and she's …"

"You think, after all momma and I have been through, that I'd be content with my children thinking like that?" Bates cut John off calmly.

The youth turned and looked at his father in surprise. John Bates Sr. was neutral in most things, but he was also a pragmatist. The last thing the boy expected was for him to support such a novel fantasy as the one being read to John Jr.'s heart. Mr. Bates smiled at his son, placing a hand on his son's shoulder.

"You are my son …" He said. "Whatever you decided to do, whatever you do, you will have a father and mother who support you, even if she won't say it now." Bates entrusted with love. "All we ask is that you consider the consequences of what your heart tells you. That you think of your future, of the kind of life you can provide for yourself, before you pursue this." He shook his shoulder.

John was silent a long moment, staring out at the darkness, before he bowed his head. "I'm sorry ..." He apologized for the rash thinking. He felt a moment of shame, allowing his strong emotions to get the better of his reason.

There was a soft chuckle as the older man, content with the love for his family, shook him. "Oh, what it is to be young." He snorted softly. After a long moment, he patted his son's shoulder. "Come, Mr. Carson and Thomas are anxious for this 'Midnight Feast' to get underway. And they can't do it without you." He motioned his head over to the candle dimmed servant's hall beyond the door.

He turned back and watched his son pull on his servant's livery. His eyes were cast out into the dark horizon, scanning the outline of the Downton garden shuttering in the heavy rain. His face looked anxious and sad as if he was waiting for someone to appear.

"You think he's out there, dad?" John asked quietly.

Mr. Bates bowed his head, leaning heavily on his cane. "Anything's possible." He answered gently. He didn't give the boy hope, but he did not discourage the thought of it either. The young man turned back to the dark and nodded.

"If there's anyone who could get out of a scrape, it's gonna be George." John said with all the confidence that was felt in hero worship.

George Crawley had been as much a folk hero to the youth of the village of Downton as he had been to the aristocracy in London. He had been a rebel fighter, an outlaw, and adventurer on the wild America continent. From the slippery steam filled streets of New York City. The magical dangers of the romanticized French Quarter of New Orleans, and riding through the vast deserts down in Mexico on a steed as fast as polished steel. His stories of adventure had been published in 'The Sketch' by Lady Edith over the years and had circulated around the Downton school yard as much as it has the lavished drawing rooms of Gosford Park. The village was filled with dozens of young boys wandering the woods, pretending that they were on the brink of danger from Mercenaries in the beautiful and dangerous gas-lit Mexican town of Dejalo on the sacred 'Day of the Dead'. They walked around like they had Webley Revolvers at their side and a Red Indian's fighting knife in their boot. When the teenager had gone out to eat with Miss Sybbie at the Grantham Arms, eventually he could be found sitting at the bar. There, he was enthralling a crowd of fathers and sons who asked for a tale of danger and mystery from the magic shops of New Orleans or the back alleys of San Antonio.

But unlike everyone else, George had been more than just a heroic figure in 'The Sketch', or the fancied subject of debutante teas to JJ Bates. He had known George personally and had come to see the young man as a big brother figure.

The youth had been close to his parents when he was JJ's age, and though he had heard much of George growing up, it wasn't till he was elven that the boy had returned home to Downton. He had come to dinner every Friday at his house. He told stories, not the edited stuff that Lady Edith published, but what had really happened. He still remembered falling asleep with his head against his momma's breast, listening and watching the figures of his father and George sitting in the two leather chairs by the fire, talking quietly. When the guys at school asked him to describe the young hero, John stuck to Lady Edith's lines they read in their mother's magazine. But the George that JJ knew and watched talking to his father was a lonesome figure filled with an unshakable sorrow. When the other kids speculated about him at school, John didn't partake, feeling sad and sympathetic for his hero. The young man they thought went off on some wild and dangerous jaunt to raise hell around town, actually spent most nights at his home in Crawley House. He sat broodingly by the fire in his father's chair all night, while Mrs. Crawley, his grandmother, sat in a rocking chair by the window, waiting for a son who would never come home.

John had become close to his tragic hero, not by being interesting, or trying to impress him like others thought they had too. He simply just wanted to be the lonely and sad young man's friend. So it was between bitter battles with Lady Mary and Lord Grantham, secret trips to London in search of a blind Turk, and taking care of Mrs. Crawley, that George went off into the grand countryside for several days. And sometimes he'd take JJ with him. There were times that Sybbie went, and other times it was just the two of them. People, even Lady Mary (Who swore him to secrecy), would ask John Jr. what they did those weekends, what they talked about. But the truth was that they didn't say much at all. If Miss Sybbie was with them, there was a lot of laughing and fun. But when it was just George and JJ, they just sat around and stared at the fire. It was in those days that JJ Bates came to realize that some people just need someone. They didn't need them to be funny, to be conversational, or to be clever …

They just needed someone to be there.

So when John Bates Jr. looked out to the gardens that night, on the dark, stormy, horizon. His father knew who he was looking for. Not the folk hero of the village, not the flashy racer that they watched on a movie screen at the British Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York, and not the war hero in the papers. The boy was looking for the quiet young man who sat by the fire sipping from a steaming mug, pushing up the blanket on the sleeping young boy next to him. And that was who every member of the staff knew well and was praying was out there too.

"Come, you don't want Mrs. Hughes to come looking for you." He warned with a playful smile.

There was an anxious, half-hearted, grin on his son's face in response as he let his father usher him toward the servant's hall. He went in, clasping his hands together and rubbing them, trying to wash his fear for his friend away. Mr. Bates watched him go, staying behind to look out in the darkness. His face was grave, his eyes carried a secret sorrow in them, and he sighed almost dejectedly.

Lady Mary, Mr. Branson, and he had been part of the first group of travelers from the commuter train to be ferried to Downton, by Daisy and Mrs. Patmore from the Mason farm at Yew Tree. He had asked Daisy to stop on the road when he saw a grounded fighter, its smoking embers flickered their smoky souls to the sweet summer night air. He and Mr. Branson had gone to check, hoping to find a pilot alive. The whole fighter had been burned out. No one said a word but Lady Mary who shakily asked both Mr. Branson and Mr. Bates not to breathe a word to Lady Grantham.

Crashed into a familiar tree that had haunted Mary Josephine Crawley for twenty years, there was a familiar Spitfire. Battle damage, cannon grazes, and the explosion had scrapped away a portion of olive drab paint under the cockpit. And there, uncovered by the wear and tear of the action of the day, was the painted over coat of arms for the House of Grantham.

Someone had painted it on the side of the fighter for a photo-op several months ago. The furious triple ace, upon seeing it, grabbed the painter by his jumpsuit and slammed him against the canopy. "Get that shit off my plane!" He had roared at the RAF's public relation officer, photographer, and the painter, pointing to the noble crest. Now red tinted eyes were glued too it. A trembling leather glove rubbed the scarred and grazed graphic, while the other held a piece of marble that had been part of Matthew Crawley's roadside memorial.

It was the second time this road, this tree, this very spot, had robbed from Lady Mary a piece of her soul.

The low rumble of thunder brought the valet back. Lowering his head in respect, Mr. Bates said a small prayer. With a grunt, the valet limped inside, shutting the door. When he was gone there was a flash of lightning and a roaring crash of thunder that shook the house. And in the flash of light a shadowy figure slipped from behind a garden tree.

And in the soft candle glow of the manor house, the light glinted off the barrel of a Luger pistol in a bloody hand.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _Waltz of my Heart" – Ivor Novello & Patrick Doyle_

" _The Land of Might-Have-Been" – Ivor Novello & Jeremy Northam_

* * *

Happy Valentine's Day! …

I mean... I guess?


	18. The Masque of the Red Death - Part I

**The Masque of the Red Death: Part I**

The candlelight shadows flickered and moved with feline ease, throwing stain glass shapes on the ceiling and walls of the large, opulent, bedroom. From the distance a deep rumble shook the contents of the room. There was a loud sliding clatter of a metal picture frame on a vanity made of polished mahogany veneer. Just a week ago they'd say that it sounded quite like a proper battlefield out there. But after today, after two nights in London shelters, it simply sounded like a thunderstorm. A battlefield, a real battle, it sounded very different than anything that nature, that god, had conjured in the clouds. There were worst things in this world that lurked and fell from the sky than lightning and thunder. They were man made terrors that brought on the clench of the deepest terror and the swell of the most admirable gallantry as they passed above you. And today of all days, the woman sitting in her vanity seat would never forget what she had seen.

Red tinted eyes stared at the elegant figure they belonged to within the mirror. Some would say that Lady Mary Crawley had aged so gracefully that one could hardly notice. But she had, if no one else would. There wasn't a wrinkle, a blemish, or sag of skin around her throat. She was as tight, smooth, and fresh as she had been in twenty years. It was true that mama, and even Edith, had also look perfectly splendid and ageless as well. But there was something different about Mary, something almost supernatural. It was starting to make her self-aware, the whispers starting to pick up. Since then she had asked Anna to research tricks, little things with her makeup regiment that made her seem … more mature, give her some artificial age. Anna didn't seem to understand Mary's growing discomfort. Most women would kill to have genes of an Olympian goddess, like her employer. But the woman just didn't understand …

The frowning figure of sadness and worry, picked up the metal picture frame from its face planted position. Behind the glass cover had been a collegian chap. He had crystal eyes, blond hair, and a look of nothing but the most noble intentions of spirit. The intensity in his eyes would've led you to believe he was a stern kind of man, at home in an operating room, or saving a dying man with chemicals. But he was so ever kind, prickly and moody when pushed, but never considered to do anything that was not right. It was the most frustrating thing about him, especially for someone like his wife, who thought moral selflessness was more a guideline than a rule book in life.

Lady Mary held her beloved Matthew's picture in her pallid and soft hands, staring at it, at him. Then she looked back in the mirror at herself. Anna never understood why Mary fretted about the unnatural stagnation of youth upon her. But it was hard to put into words the pain of seeing herself every day since Matthew had died. Most woman age, sag, loosen, they show the wear of the years upon them. She hadn't anything to show for it, there was no separation from the death of Matthew. She looked very much the same as she had the day he died, and had found the same woman staring back at her every day since. There was no moving on, no show of difference year to year, it was a prolonged torment of waiting. Every wrinkle, every sag, and flab signaled one more day closer to joining her beloved, joining everyone she had ever lost. But there was nothing of the sort. Her spirit was strangled in a noose tied in her enduring beauty and perfection.

A thumb rubbed Matthew's frozen face behind glass as the room rumbled and the candle light flickered. His face, her unchanged face, and the shadows in both her room and in her heart brought her right back where she had been all night. It was the place where she had been languishing for so long, where she had been convinced her spirit would remain when she died, to haunt it forever. It was a brushy undergrowth of foliage on the side of a country road where a tree had tipped over a car, and where a Spitfire had broken the memorial to the latter.

It was the first time she felt close to him, to her child, in after fourteen years, and it was in the chaos above Yew Tree Farm. Their train sped below a true, hellish, rain of fire. It was beastly loud and frightening, the roar of engines buzzing right over their head as cannon fire rattled above them and just feet from the tracks. People inside their boxcar had ducked in panic, hiding under their seats. Meanwhile the others had been frozen in fascination by the complete terror and odd beauty of the modern spectacle of an air battle. They had all heard it described on the radio and read about it in the papers, still pictures printed in black and white of dueling dots and their vapor and smoke trails above Big Ben. But to be witness to it first hand was hard to describe, no matter what the papers had written. Canvas and aluminum marvels and their human operators falling from the sky on fire, crashing into the earth below all around them.

It was like something out of Milton.

And yet, while everyone else hid, Mary was glued to her neighbor's window, frustratingly pushing away Tom's arms trying to pull her down for the safety of cover. Her red tinted eyes scanned the sky desperately. She was chasing speeding planes whizzing by, overhead, and spinning in the distance. Next to her, the radio was hot with chatter. RAF pilots were directing and calling out death. Their terrible and tormented screams buzzed in her ear. Their death rattles coincided with a flash of flames and smoke trails that crashed into the fields in the distance or just yards from her window. But she was incensed to stay at her post every time Rogue One was on the radio. She was fanatical in trying to make out which one was her boy, her baby, her George. Most mothers would want to look away, would not want to watch their child in danger. But Lady Mary was never a pearl clutching debutante. She had to know, not to be left to the sideline to wonder, rely on the stronger stomach to relay her worst nightmares. If something was going to happen to George, she wanted to be the first to know, to see it with her own eyes. If the first war, and Matthew in it, had taught her anything, it was that imagining what happened was always worse than seeing it.

Her heart was in her throat throughout the battle. But she felt like a ghost, like she was out of body, when she heard George calling for help. From her window she saw him. Mary couldn't explain how she knew it was him, but she just … just felt it. It didn't make any sense. They were never close, even when he had loved her. But she knew it was George, and god help her she saw how much trouble he was in before he had. Mary had made quite a fool of herself when she shouted a warning from her first class boxcar, like he could hear her. It didn't help to pound on the window like she did, but she couldn't help it. She was standing on the sandy shore, while her child was drowning, and she couldn't find a life preserver to throw to him. She watched the modified and customized Spitfire smoothly and elegantly bank and twist above them. The daring and sleek maneuvers were like watching Marigold dance on stage. The young pilot's flying was like an art form all on its own. It was an art that was presented in complete ignorance to the talent that was trying to save his life from two German fighters giving chase. The patterns and narrow misses, the twists and turns, it was like watching an elegant chess match of speed.

And the brilliant performance would be the death of the most invested patron watching from afar.

Lady Mary was not impressed. She was not hypnotized by the choreography that could never be planned in a thousand years. She was angered, near enraged the longer it went on. Would no one help him? Was there no one that was gonna help her boy? She saw the red tint in her eyes, incensed till they nearly glowed. Where was George's wingman? Where was Atticus for god's sake? To think of a man that they had taken in, allowed into their family with open arms. And here, when he was to earn his keep, he was nowhere to be found. Mary Crawley didn't give a fig about king and country when it came to her child in trouble. As shocking as it might have been for anyone beyond Anna to hear it, Mary cared a great deal about what happened to her only child, her final child. She had accepted long ago that George didn't care that she cared. But it didn't stop her from feeling for him so strongly. No matter what terms a mother and her child were on, one did never, truly, stop being a mother.

There was protest in the war correspondent across from her, when Mary snatched the radio from him. She didn't care what duty Atticus thought he had. When he married Rose, when they reconciled, his priorities changed. King, country, duty … no, what mattered was family. Crawley's stuck together, and by god if that man was going to be allowed into Downton again, he was going to honor his first duty. And that was to George. She conveyed that reminder in an angry and desperate sentence, shouted into the radio. She didn't protest when the device was reclaimed by its owner, she felt just a pinch of vindication when all activity on the radio ban went to locating and helping George after her unauthorized protest. She held her hands together as she watched them, and in her worry, in her deep anxiety, she felt a heady rush that made her feel faint.

For just a moment she was in the foyer in Downton. Matthew had her in his arms and they were dancing again. She was expecting Lavinia to come down any minute to catch them. But instead, she saw George standing there, watching them. It was like being stuck in two different worlds. Her words had two meanings in their shared universe, a stick for Matthew and a stick for George. They were a man leaning on a stick for his recovering back, and a man leaning on a stick for his life. She was angry and worried. Why was George there with them, when he should be looking out for himself out there? Her love and worry kept coming out in a calling for George to get back to his own stick. Then, she was back on the train. With a teary smirk, she watched her boy save himself, and for once in his life …

He had listened to her.

It was hard to remember, to analyze, this shared dream world of theirs. Not a moment later did Atticus Aldridge, Second Count of Sinderby, fall to his fiery death through Daisy's barn at Yew Tree Farm. There was nothing as horrific as watching someone you had known for fifteen years, who your adopted little sister loved so fiercely, die in such a way. His fighter had been completely sawed in half. There was no elegance, no lyrical final act to his fall to earth. It was an awkward and twisting journey to the ground. When she closed her eyes she could still hear how his long and terrified scream of Rose's name seamlessly turned to high pitched white noise in his com as the front of his plane exploded right in front of them. Her heart twisted when she thought of how close Atticus and Rose had become in the last few years. From the moment that Rose was well enough to return to her family, the two had found a renaissance of love amongst themselves.

Her bedroom door opened suddenly. Mary turned toward it and sighed in relief to be relieved of the memories of the afternoon. Anna Bates would always be a comfort in any situation. In the lady's maid's hand was a pair of high heels. She was giving them a last minute scrub with a brush as she entered the darkness. She stopped and looked up at the switched off lamps.

Anna scoffed. "Such a strange life, M'Lady." She shook her head as she approached. "We went half of our lives without Electricity, and now for the life of me, I can't imagine a world without it." She sighed, using candle light to finish her polishing.

Watching, Mary leaned her delicate chin on her wrists. "I quite agree …" she glanced at the candelabra flicker in her vanity mirror's reflection. "But being Lord Leftenant, His Lordship would never hear the end of it if didn't follow military regulation to the letter. Complete blackout after air-raids and all that." She sighed.

"Sir, yes, sir …" Anna saluted with the brush halfheartedly, smirking as she finished. "I'm sorry, M'Lady, I should've had it done sooner, but with the battle …" She began.

Mary removed a string of diamond pearls from her jewelry box. "Oh, I think with Germans trying to kill us, we can let it go just this once, don't you agree?" She ran the cool strand of beads through the gaps of her smooth fingers.

Placing the polished heels on the woman's hope chest, the pretty maid strode busily back behind Lady Mary. "Any more days like today and I'm gonna feel more like a Batman than a lady's maid." Her deft digits were gentle and efficient in complete familiarity as she clasped the priceless necklace together over her mistress's supple pale neck.

There was just a tilted curl in the woman's lips. "Imagine how Madge must feel? She must be deathly afraid that she just got promoted to loader for 'The Great Nazi Slayer' down the hall." Mary adjusted her necklace.

Anna smirked, but there was chastisement in her voice. "Make all the jokes you want, M'Lady … but I admire her ladyship's courage this afternoon. She defended her home, nothing wrong with that." She went back to get the shoes.

Applying perfume, the beauty scoffed. "Edith shooting down a Nazi fighter … and I thought her being a Marchioness was the most absurd thing." She said distractedly while dabbing a wrist again her neck as she looked at herself in the mirror.

Lifting her black nylon skirt, the maid slipped to her knees. She glared with good nature at the snobbish tone in her employer's voice. Mary turned and allowed Anna to begin fitting her shoes on her slender feet. She watched, running a brush through her long, waved, dark locks. Her hair was straightened to silky perfection, but the front was waved from the side part, framing her left eye, in order to give her a mysterious and seductive look. It was a midnight, candle lit, feast filled with over a dozen guests. But Lady Mary wasn't going to skimp on her beauty standards. Not even when her world, her very soul, was in jeopardy of disappearing in an abyss of sorrow and regret tonight.

The two women, the two life-long friends, had done this a hundred, a thousand times before. Mary didn't even watch anymore, didn't even feel the shoe slip on. When she stood, she'd just expect it to be there. It was the repetition that kept her sane, kept all of them from completely falling apart. It was familiar surroundings, familiar faces, familiar customs and routine that kept it all from devolving. It was the party like gathering for a dinner in finery and gown that kept this apocalyptic war from consuming everyone under this roof.

Or they had told themselves …

They had all absconded from the train, on George's own orders. For hours they waited under the cover of forest by the tracks. There were a hundred of them, from every walk of life. There were titled aristocrats, a Marquess, three Earls, four Countesses, and a Duchess. Among the many common of commoners were dozens of refugee children. They were all huddled together, brothers and sisters, cousins, and other children they just met that day. They carried fear in their hearts after witnessing such horrors. And still there were others that wandered around, mesmerized by their first time in an actual forest. Eventually, when the radio signal from the York Fighter Control said all clear, claiming victory for the day, most everyone got back on the train for Ripon.

But those who were going to Downton, which was all of the aristocracy it seemed, instead were forced to hike to Yew Tree Farm. The engineer was not going to be stopping at the Downton station. Not for such a comparatively small group, and not when there were children on board and maybe more Germans on the way. Her Papa surprised many of their peers, but not his family, when he whole heartedly agreed with the engineer. The old Tom Branson had gotten quite the kick out of watching aristocrats hike a mile through the woods to Yew Tree Farm. And they all got a kick out of watching Daisy, Andy, and a visiting Mrs. Patmore's faces upon seeing so many fancy Lords and Ladies immerge so suddenly from the tree line and descend on their farm.

It seemed surreal for so many of the high born to be huddled in the twilight, sipping tea from tin mugs, and watching the sunset of such a deadly day surrounded by twisted and broken flying machines. Mary had watched a duchess in fine jewelry and wide brimmed bonnet staring out at the flickering embers of a Nazi bomber buried nose first in a beet field. Her eyes transfixed on the dead German crew whose bodies were in pieces and fertilizing the back nine. Bates and Papa were off to the side, Robert with a comforting hand on his oldest and closest friend, Shrimpie Flincher's shoulder. Together they looked out at the burned out Mason Barn that was topped with the tail of Atticus's fighter, like a figurine on the top of a wedding cake. Mama was too busy trying to organize parties with Mrs. Patmore to think about what she was going to tell her youngest daughter and grandchildren about Atticus's death. Meanwhile Daisy and Andy fueled their supply truck to begin the ferrying of people to Downton Abbey.

Lady Grantham, Tom, Mary, and Bates were among the first to make the trip with Daisy, Mrs. Patmore, and along with all of their guest's servants. Tom would go back for his car to help with the transport, Mary would relay the news to the house, and Cora would help Thomas and Carson to coordinate the impromptu weekend party. The servants were expected to have everything ready for their masters and mistresses when they arrived. Papa and Shrimpie had stayed behind to manage the stragglers while the two father-in-laws tried to come to terms with the question of their daughter's husband's death. Mary sat shoulder to shoulder with Tom and her mama in the back of the truck with the rest of the servants and thought how much she did not envy their own staff at Downton. She imagined there would be a mad scramble to make up all the rooms both upstairs and downstairs for their surprise guests.

There was something strange and foreboding in the trip across the familiar countryside at dusk. It looked completely different, despite it being the same place they had seen all their lives. Every clearing, every field, and pasture were filled with downed planes. They were in scraps, shredded pieces, or burned out husks. Silhouettes of dead pilots whole or in parts lay scattered on the side of the road or alone in a farmer's field. Daisy had slowed the truck to help an RAF chap whose parachute was stuck in a tree. However, Tom and Mr. Bates came back to reveal that he was dead. Someone had shot the lad while he was helplessly trapped. It infuriated Tom, being the father of a female officer in the RAF. There were rules, a code, and an honor to the way pilot's fought. It was wrong, shamefully wrong to kill a pilot on the ground like that, a man who had parachuted to safety. But the days of 'The Great War' were over. These were not The Kaiser's Germans, professional soldiers of honor and dignity. These were Nazis, they killed to kill, and had no conscious or regret in their lack of morals. After Tom was done ranting, Mary put an arm around him as he shakily covered his eyes in weary sorrow. It had been a hard few days for everyone. As she turned she never forgot the look on her mama's face in the quiet. Her sad dark blue eyes looked out at the hills and pastures of their land with glassy emotion. In a matter of an afternoon, their wholesome slice of beautiful country had become a mass grave yard for scrap metal and too young boys. It wasn't right to just leave them out there like that, in the open for all to see. But it was late and there must have been a hundred of them scattered all over the county.

All Mary had wanted to do was get back to Downton, to get back home. All she had to do was make it through the night, and then she'd go to the airfield near Brancaster. She didn't know what she was going to say to her son after four years, but she had to see him. He had come back for them, he had saved their lives. There was no words, no thank you, no well-done that she planned. Lady Mary just wanted to see him, just wanted to … to hold him again. Any past transgressions, any feuds, she couldn't imagine why they had been so important. After what she had seen today, felt, there was no justification to continue this folly she had been perpetrating for fourteen years. It was time to face her own mistakes, and embrace a woman she thought was a relic of the past. She wanted to be the woman that had been a bride to a love of her life, a wife to a man trying to change their lives for the better future of their children. Mary Crawley was under a mountain of debt to him to see his vision was fulfilled, not the stability of a modernized estate, but the happiness and safety of the boy he did everything for. And she was committed to see that it was paid in full with interest.

But as the drizzle of rain had begun to fall, the transport truck slowed.

There was another plane on the side of the road. It was an RAF Spitfire. Mr. Bates had asked Daisy to stop so that they might help the pilot if he was still there. Mary had been lost in her own regrets, when she heard Tom softly exclaim "oh no …!" under his breath. Cora had asked what it was, but Tom said nothing as he quickly climbed out of the back of the truck. He turned back and had said Mary's name. It was a strange way it left him, shaky and fearful. It was the first time she had ever heard his voice take that tone with her. From her musings of a new future, she found herself trapped in an old temple of nightmares and heartbreak. It had been the place that _**her future had been stolen from her**_. It was the roadside where Matthew had died on the day, the hour, in which their son had been born.

She stepped off the back of the truck, as the rain started to fall harder. The Spitfire had slid a good way down the road, before it crashed into a familiar tree and obliterated the marble marker that paid memorial to Matthew Crawley. Almost to the very position, the fighter had mimicked her and Matthew's car when they had found her beloved. Mr. Bates had helped Mary collect a marble piece while Tom raced desperately through the foliage and tree line, looking for the pilot of the destroyed fighter.

Mary scoffed in annoyance. "Come, Tom, it might be heartless for me to say, but it's obviously the poor chap is dead, just like the other ones. We can always rebuild Matthew's …" She paused when Tom looked absolutely horrified at her.

"Mary …" He knew something she didn't.

"What?" She asked, confused only for a beat. Then she held Tom's fearful glance for a long, horrible, moment.

She had stupidly thought that possibly Tom had known one of the poor young men in the American volunteer squadron. It might have been a special friend of Sybbie's. Not in a million years did she think that it could've been … She turned slowly to the Spitfire that was glowing in low burning embers. The contact of the rain on the red hot metal caused steam to rise from the eviscerated cockpit that had been placed over the fuel tank. She suddenly recognized what remained of the customized and modified fighter that had stuck out uniquely in battle. Standing in this place again, this very spot in which she had lost everything, it was the irony of a lifetime of loneliness and tragedy.

The last time she had been here, it was twenty years ago. When they had told her, she was holding her baby, ready to present him to her parents. It was an anticipation that had built in the long time it had taken them to get to the hospital. She had remembered the look on her mother's face the night that Kemal Pamuk had died in her bed, she had remembered the depressed look on her father's face when he told her of his knowledge of her dark deed. Years later, it was her redemption that lay in her arms. She was not ruined, not when something so perfect, so beautiful, had come from her. A boy conceived of a love that she didn't know she could have or deserve after Kemal. She had a family now, she had people she loved, and they loved her back no matter what she had done in her past.

And then they had told her.

She had wanted to present George to his grandparents in victory, but instead she had shoved the baby into her mama's arms without a word. There were still blood and birth stains on her nightgown as she ran out of the hospital. Her papa trying to catch her, mama holding the newborn closely, pressing her forehead to his tiny face as he balled for the touch of the only woman who had held him since he was born. She had stolen the family car, her father running after the dirt trail of a woman that shouldn't have been walking, much less driving. She had skidded to a halt when she saw the ambulance and police. She was screaming his name as she ran toward the crash site, the police photographer taking pictures of their overturned car, the one that carried them home as man and wife. The policemen and orderlies had restrained her as she fought to free herself, to find Matthew. But when she saw the body wrapped in a white sheet being carted toward the ambulance, she fell to her knees. That was when she knew that it was over, _**that**_ _**nothing made sense anymore**_.

Twenty years later the rain dampened her jacket and hat as she approached another broken machine. It was the same tree, the same spot. There were superficial bullet marking and grazes that riddled the side and the aluminum wings were ripped and torn. The propeller was bent and covered in dirt that was turning to mud. But that same feeling had not gone away, that sinking abyss that was consuming her inside out. She had been having this same nightmare for months now, it was not unfamiliar territory. She just wondered what she had ever done to deserve this … again. In the glow of the embers of hot metal, she saw the family crest under scrapped and burnt paint. She thought it fitting that there was something about the design that could've been fit on a knight's shield. There was so much irony in this one scene. The first Earl of Grantham earned his title on the field of battle on this land, and the last of their line had died on the same battlefield centuries later. And both times this crest was on their stricken shield.

"George!"

"George, where are you?!"

Tom's voice was echoing softly from the forest, while Mary's hand reached out and touched the Grantham Coat of Arms. This was where the Crawley's died, this brush, this tree, this spot. Years from now, when this whole place is forgotten, she imagined that some teenagers driving down the forgotten road will see a woman in white, beautiful and haunted, standing in the exact same spot. Their headlights make her disappear, but when they turn back she's still standing there in the weeds, mourning the men she loved most where they died.

When Tom came back, he was wet and solemn. She didn't need him to tell her that he wasn't in there somewhere, that there was no trace of her boy anywhere. He was gone, everything was gone. Bates offered her consul as did Tom. There was no body, no charred skeleton, and no blood. There was hope that he was out there, that he was in the village by now. Maybe they'd find him with Edith, Rose, Thomas, and Anna at Downton. Anything was possible.

But all Mary could do was think of one thing in facing the oblivion. "Don't breathe a word of this to Mama …" She told both of the men at her side as they stared at the burnt plane.

Slowly the pale beauty was slipping on her silk gloves as she listened to the clock tick and Anna put away the London clothing for the wash. The world seemed darker now, and it was growing darker by the minute. It wasn't the candle light, or failing eye sight, it was a world in which she had failed. Downstairs they were all keeping watch for the door, Anna said. In the year that George returned, the boy was fond of going through downstairs than the front door. He had spent more time with the staff than he ever had his family and it was no wonder. They must have thought that Mary was a bad mother, not sitting and waiting for her son, not out in the storm looking for him. But the truth was that Lady Mary didn't have any hope left.

She knew in her heart that she had failed him.

She reached over and took Matthew's picture from the vanity. She stared at his face till a single tear dripped on the glass. The man had no ambition; he had no sense of tradition. Matthew was not papa. He did not feel like a great custodian of a grand and proud estate, a place to look after the work of others. The man did not believe in the lectures that all of Robert Crawley's girls had heard all of their lives. From the moment that Matthew had invested in Downton he had only one goal. And he worked tirelessly at it, and fought all of them each step of the way. The man Mary loved, he didn't believe in tradition, he didn't look back in reverence for the ways things were, it didn't serve his purpose. And Papa spent many a night wondering, blustering, and agonizing over what exactly Matthew wanted from this place. He felt as if everything was going, that there would be nothing left, and what was the point of it all? Even Mary, who had been quite content to be the crowned princess of the county didn't quite understand what her husband was about. He wanted no personal gain. He did not sweat to turn a profit off the back of the estate. And it didn't occur to her till the moment that he had held their boy in his arms for the first time.

 _He_ was Matthew Crawley's purpose.

For so long he fought her and papa, and all of it for their child, for their son. Matthew Crawley's life ambition was to make sure George was taken care of, that he would never find himself penniless, saddled to a sinking ship, trying to save it with one bucket. He had done it all so that their child would always have a home. All of these years, Mary, Tom, and Papa had run the estate together; they had told themselves that they were honoring Matthew's vision. They had all built him up as some visionary that had saved them all with his intelligence and moral fortitude. But the truth they all didn't seem to understand was that they had stolen the crown in their regency. Matthew didn't modernize this estate, the way they did things, for them. He had done it for George. Matthew had done it so that his boy would never want for anything. And Mary had stolen it from him. She had stolen everything that her beloved had worked for their entire lives together from their boy in one horrible decision on a Christmas morning. What was the point in everything that Matthew had ever done when George had spent fourteen years in exile, alone?

For one last time, Mary Josephine Crawley … had ruined everything.

"Oh Anna …!"

When the mature maid looked up, the glamorous woman had her picture of Matthew hugged tightly to her breast. Her eyes were closed and she was slouched forward. Her velvet voice was lost in despair and defeat. Just a moment ago she was poking fun at her younger sister and rival, now, she was completely overtaken by emotions. Anna, of all people, knew that the helplessness and despair came in unexpected waves while waiting for the one you love most in the world to turn up alive or dead. One minute she was in the middle of dragging Lady Edith, as Lady Mary was apt to do when something good happened to her middle sister. But now she was completely broken.

"It's going to be all right, M'Lady." Anna comforted by placing a hand on Mary's bare shoulder. "We all know it's going to take more than a few Nazis to stop Master George …" She wrapped her arms around her mistress.

"Do we? Because, I don't! Don't you understand? I missed it, I missed all of it!" Mary sobbed. "I don't know if he's as strong as you all say … I don't … I don't know him, Anna! God! I didn't even know my own child!" Mary sounded so disgusted with herself, here at the end.

Mary thought, like a fool, that if she could just go back to the woman she was, before Matthew, it would be easier. She was tough, too tough to be ever hurt again. She thought that was who she was. A woman with her own mind, her own intentions, and all the means to do whatever she wanted. Mary Josephine Crawley wanted to be a force to be reckoned with. She'd be everything that her Granny wanted her to be, fashioned her to be in rebellion of the times they had both grown up in. She was a strong, independent woman, who didn't apologize for anything. But standing on the same roadside again, holding a piece of marble …

Lady Mary hadn't even known where to start.

* * *

The mass candlelight threw shadows and odd shapes on ancient portraits, stone carvings, and columns in the lobby of the great house. There was a serene, religiosity, to the grand manor's appearance on the violently stormy night. In soft candle glow of the late night, there was a certain sanctity in the dark halls and gilded walls of the castle. Something hallow and venerable when all the glamour and polish was muted in the dark. The smell of wax and plumes of smoke from the army of little flames created an incense of aroma that overpowered the lobby. And in the quiet, between the booming thunder and flash of aggressive forks of lightning, one could almost believe that they had taken shelter in a church, in an Abbey.

But those looking for salvation of the spirit could not find it within these halls. A specter of restless sorrow hung over the castle for many long years. The air was heavy with regret and longing sentimentality for a simpler time. Like many English Estates, there had been those who knew the feeling, the overpowering sense of uselessness, of irrelevance to the scheme of things. They were the spoils of a certain childhood that tasted like fancy dinner parties by candlelight and sounded like the trumpet of the hunt, gone forever in the vivid nostalgic romanticism in the days of Victoria and Edward. Now these ever dwindling estates that still remained were like tourist magnets for the rich and entitled peers that do with a London House. They're given a taste of the old days, of the old ways, to grasp what little memory and feeling that they could from a life and world that had changed so drastically in the past fifty years.

But the simpler times that these halls craved for was not for the days of Austen and Victoria, the flutter of pheasant and the pull of a shotgun. The longing in the core of the stately manor of Downton Abbey was but for the times when the pursuit of love and happiness was alive within the halls. It was in the great follies and triumphs of youthful romances that had been found and pursued within the corridors, bedrooms, and libraries. Then, when the possibilities seemed endless and the future was but the lover's name carved on one's heart. A foyer where a simple country solicitor, wounded in war, danced with a grand lady for the first time in so long. They knew they shouldn't have been together, but the pull toward the other's heart were too strong, their souls like puzzle pieces that only fit when joined together. There was a kitchen where the youngest daughter of an Earl, the prize beauty of the house, had baked her mama a cake. Happily successful and surrounded by the adoration of the kitchen maids, she turned to catch the eye of the chauffeur. Standing off to the side, mug in hand, he locked eyes and she knew how much he loved her. And she'd never admit it, not ever, but she loved him too.

These were the simpler times, the deep sentiments, that the decaying house cried for in the night. A world of yesterday when the future and happiness was being built one heartache at a time. Then, in the noble pursuit of young love, there was no talk, no understanding of what failure was, what it meant. A Solicitor, a Chauffeur, a Lady Nurse, and a Debutante, they didn't know the word. They'd wait months, years, and decades to be with the one that they dreamed of in bed each night. It was in the thrill of the hunt, in the search of the truth, and the true wrench of the disappointment that was in each stone that made this house. Now, it lived in the shadows of those great loves, and in their failures. The Lady and the Lawyer, The Nurse and Chauffeur were but a dwindling memory, their blood spent in the years of regret, resentment, and bad decisions that followed their tragic ends and born in the souls their love had created.

Now, the manor, one of the last remaining estates, was a cursed place. A haunted castle filled with monsters and phantoms in the shape of sorrow, grief, regret, and stagnation. The house had survived crisis of war, money management, taxes, and a Depression. But the people, the very soul of the house, did not. Scattered, divided, and filled with self-blame and doubt, the castle remained for the high born tourist, but like so many estates before it, there was nothing left. The possessions remained, but the soul, the very life was gone.

Downton Abbey was a ruin of happier yesterdays.

There was a hearty warmth that was comfortably maintained in the main library. A yellow glow in a red tinted room gave an orange hue to the ever crowding meeting place as the door opened to reveal one or two more people. They were many old faces, a young woman here and there, and a mature man with a limp that was exaggerated for those who wondered why he wasn't in the army at a time like this. They all wore tuxedos, bow ties, and tails. The women had broken out their finest gowns they could summon. Silk, sequence, satin … the usual 's' fabrics from French stores in Paris, or in Belgrave square. There was talk in the papers of rich and titled women in London buying out Paris shops for their catalog after the Nazi Blitz broke the French and British Expeditionary lines in the spring. They were hoping to save the best cuts before the German's took Paris. Hinging bets against their own country, their own soldiers? It was flat out treason! Robert Crawley had stated in disgust to Cora that they'd not host any women who hedged bets against their own men at the front. Now, all those women walked freely through his house with the latest in Paris fashion, before it fell.

There was quiet chatter in the library, as people came together. It was an oddity to see them form a small group, greet one another with a half nod, a ghosted smirk, and not say a word. There was hardly an appropriate joke, an engrossing conversation, or interesting story that could be told after the afternoon they had. Word traveled fast of the dead Earl of Sinderby today, killed in battle right before their very eyes. And if they hadn't heard him on the radio scream his wife's name before he disappeared in high pitched white noise, then they heard it from the drawing room. The Marquees of Flintshire, the last to arrive from Yew Tree Farm with Lord Grantham, told his daughter of her husband's death within earshot of them all. There were very few people who didn't look guilty when they heard the beautiful Countess shriek and collapse on the stairs. Her sobbing echoing loudly as her mother and two fathers gathered her up. She begged it not to be true, pleaded for them to check again, as they carried her up the stairs. For so many of them in the library, the war was something that happened on the radio. It was something that they read about in the papers. But coming from London, a night in the shelters, and the battle they had been caught up in this afternoon, it finally dawned on them that no one was safe. The picturesque, wholesome, English country littered with twisted metal and broken corpses was sign enough that the Nazis were coming for all of them.

In the somber atmosphere of the best dressed of the high class, Robert Crawley cut a perfect figure in the very image that embodied the mood in his house. There was something gloomy, brooding, and tired in the older gentlemen. The crackling flames of the fireplace reflected in his sad eyes, his large hand grasping the mantle as he looked deeply into the fire. The master of the house was in another time, another place. A time he was standing behind that red sofa, holding hands with his wife, as Isobel informed him that he had another grandchild, a grandson. It was happiness, a serenity that he had seldom felt in his life. All the joy when he held each of his girls in his arms after they came into this world safely, but none of the nervousness and anxiety of a father. The demon that plagued him, cursed him since the Titanic, had been slayed. He had an heir who was madly in love with his little girl, and their long suffering love had finally had a happy ending …

For maybe an hour.

It was a cruel joke and a crueler fate. To be standing by that same stretch of road and seeing one more sleek, flashy, piece of machinery steal another one of his heirs, one more of his sons. Daisy had stopped in front of the plane. It was only the three of them. Shrimpie and he were very quiet, not envying the task ahead of them. How do you hurt someone who only ever loved? Who only ever knew how to love? He loved Rose … he loved the girl, his girl, till it hurt. And there was nothing harder in the world than knowing that they had to break her heart. It made Robert physically sick, no matter how stern he tried to maintain himself. To hurt Rose, for anyone to intentionally hurt that girl, seemed like a crime on heaven itself. That was why he didn't want to prolong that guilt, the sickness inside him, and why he shot Daisy a death glare when she seemingly stopped in the middle of the road. A streak of violet was layered between the starry curtain of night and the tree line in the west, when both Shrimpie and Robert asked why the former Kitchen Maid stopped her truck.

Suddenly Daisy started to cry, shaking her head, telling him that Lady Mary said not to say anything, but she had made this trip five times already, and she didn't think it was right every time she passed it. But before Robert asked what she meant, she pointed to the silhouette of a Spitfire run aground. He knew almost immediately what she was talking about. If Mary didn't want him to know, if it was a Spitfire downed between Downton and Ripon.

There was only one person that fighter belonged too.

They had left Daisy crying in the truck as both older men went to the plane. There was no body, no sign of anyone being there, just a burnt out husk of twisted metal, twenty tallies of iron crosses and swastikas under the cockpit on one side, and an unearthed Grantham crest on the other. Robert had felt faint, felt a swell of sorrow that he hadn't felt since his own stillborn child lay motionless in his arms. He laid his hands on the charred leather seat and shuttered a broken sigh. "Oh my dear chap!" he sputtered.

"Not both of them … not all of them." He heard Shrimpie clench in sorrow, a voice fighting hard against a sob. Robert had forgotten that George was his friend. And he worried for his best friend's health when the older man clenched his chest and leaned on a tree in private. He had lost a son-in-law and a good friend in one day. And Robert had lost everything.

He always knew since the night that they had sent George's medal for Dunkirk to Downton, that it was a possibility. There was no one who knew better than Robert Crawley how thin the ice was to complete disaster. He had lived four years of it with Matthew in the first war. But this was different than last time. Robert had loved Matthew, he admired his spirit, his morality, and he loved how he loved Mary. He was a good man, the best man he had known. But Matthew was his son, not his child. His experience of Matthew Crawley came later in life, in his energies to make his world a better place, and in his pursuit of his eldest daughter. But George wasn't just Robert's heir, he was his child. He came from his and Cora's blood, he came from their daughter's womb. George was a part of Cora and himself. His admiration and fatherly fondness for Matthew was nothing compared to the utter madness of love he had for his grandson. Nights in 1916 were spent massaging Cora's belly in bed to sooth himself to sleep, were now sleepless nights in 1940. Every day, most of the day, Robert Crawley could be found with stacks of current newspapers open to the war section, and sitting in front of the Radio, listening to it as it happened. He had devoured Atticus's secret letters of Sybbie and George's activities. At all hours of the night he paced the library, absently listening to new and exciting music for any urgent news break. The maids, often than not, found his lordship sleeping in the library chair with the radio on softly. Robert Crawley knew how to fight a war, but he didn't know how to sit through one when his children were fighting it.

It had been twelve years of torment, of late nights staring at the ceiling, wondering if he had only said something, done something. He was an Edwardian, when he saw a discrepancy in parenting, when he saw a chance to place his opinion, he ignored it. He was bred to not interfere in the affairs of others, including his own daughters' lives. He loved Mary dearly, and as a shrewd business partner, who he saw grow into a powerful woman of consequence; she was after his own heart. He admitted that, for years, he had stopped seeing Mary as his girl, and saw her as a beautiful, infallible, figure of British virtue. And as such, in his spell of being mesmerized by the splendid success Lady Mary had become, he had trusted her to a fault. When she sent George away to Crawley House with Isobel and Dickey, he convinced himself that this goddess of his own creation was wise, as the boy mother, and as a smart woman. When George refused to come to tea or Luncheon from Crawley House, he figured that Mary would sort him out. When Mary had sent him to America, he had allowed his infatuation with his prized princess blind him to Edith's desperate arguments to stay the madness of the decision. His middle girl was furious and passionate, begging in Cora and his room to not allow it to happen. Cora swore she'd talk to Mary, and they did.

While George packed his bags in the village, Cora and Edith had fought Mary to the bitter end over it. Cora had been raised by Ester Grace Murray, the black maid that ran Amantha Mansion. She had been looked after by Toby Lee Greensburg, the black foremen of the Plantation of Amantha Point. And Cora was taught by Ms. Fleur Eloise, a French Governess who molded her into an American Princess in the marble halls of San Sochi and Levinson Manors. But the one person who had nothing to do with her childhood was Martha Levinson, her own mother. And that kind of neglect, aloof disinterest, and disdain for a child's needs was what would be waiting for George if Mary allowed him to be ward to his Great-Grandmother in New York. Mary, more concerned with not wanting her son to see Isobel waste away, argued that George wouldn't be seeing much of her anyway. He'd be educated in the finest schools in New York, given a real head start. Plus, Rose and Atticus were there if he needed family. Edith angrily declared that, with Robert's permission, she'd raise George herself. He and Marigold were thick as thieves, and Bertie had come to truly enjoy young George's style and manner.

In the middle of the night, Robert would look back at that moment, all eyes upon him as head of the family, and call himself the fool. He trusted Mary; he trusted that it was her business to make decisions for her child. Would it be any different than sending him to Eton? And of course Rose and Atticus were there as well. And if there was anyone who could make someone feel more loved than they could stand, it was darling Rose. It was his excuse for siding with his daughter, siding with one more bad decision, and siding with being a good gentleman over what his heart said. Edith drove George to South Hampton, and then she didn't return to Downton for months. Cora asked that Robert sleep in his dressing room for many weeks afterward. And George never wrote.

He was haunted by his decision in the year later when the world seemed to collapse overnight. The Depression's noose came slowly for England, but every night they heard of violent riots in every American city. New York blasted in devastation. And no one, not Rose, not Madeline, and not any school in New York City, knew where George was. Cora had taken Robert into their room and screamed at him for hours, raged and ranted about the fool she had married. In that moment, when they truly thought George was dead, killed in a riot that burned down the Levinson home in Cincinnati, she hated him, and Robert hated himself. It was as if Sybil had died again, and this time there was no Mama to bring them back together. Cora had gone to stay in London. She couldn't bear to look at her husband or eldest daughter. It was only when Mary had found George, searching tirelessly for a year, when she arrived at Brancaster. She begged Edith to use her diplomatic privileges to get him, and begged her mama for forgiveness and to come home. But she did it, warning Mary, that it wasn't her forgiveness that her daughter should be asking for. However, several months later it was a dagger in the heart to everyone, a true gutting, when Edith returned without the boy. He had no intention of coming back to this place, to them, citing the same excuses they had given for sending him in the first place. Robert knew his wife would've killed him, if they hadn't needed each other so much.

It was a tug and pull of emotions. Two years of shame and sorrow, mixed with indignation and frustration of who this child thought he was. Each of Robert's notes had been unanswered, as were all of theirs but Sybbie, Marigold, and Edith. Mary, whose moment of reprieve and redemption was crushed by George's resentful statement of staying behind, took the cut deep into her soul. She nearly got a slap from Cora, when she haughtily blurted out at a crowded dinner that when it came to George " _If Edith wants him, she can have him, by all means, I'm sure she can do a better job then I did."_ Cora, controlling her fury, asked Mary to remove herself from the table. Robert knew his daughter's statement reminded her mama of Martha's own 'absent talk' about her. They both knew that within the snobbish tone was cloaked a deep self-loathing. The red eyed beauty meant every word. She had failed George, and was willing to turn him over completely to Edith. But Cora would never allow it; her daughter would never get off that easy.

Cora Crawley would make sure no mother ever would again.

He felt guilty, horribly guilty in the saga that unfolded without him. He had allowed his own bitter feelings get in the way of being a good grandfather, the only father figure in the boy's life. It began when the Foreign Office got word that a large price had been put on the head of a British National named George Crawley, the Viscount of Downton Abbey. A Senator, with the very familiar name to Robert and Cora, called Van Houten was building the scheme with Pinkertons. They were hoping that the fortune offered would turn the entire city against the boy. It would be open season on Crawley's and he'd have nowhere to run in poverty ridden New York. Receiving the cable from the consulate, Bertie immediately took off to get George, Rose, Atticus, and their children out of harm's way.

Before leaving, Robert and Cora insisted on coming. Both knew the Van Houten family, and had their own score to settle with the horrid power couple who had done everything but put Cora and Robert on the rack to torment them in their young courtship. But Bertie was diplomatic in conveying that this wasn't a societal affair involving battling wittily at a dinner table. The expedition was going to be extremely hazardous. So much so that Bertie was no even allowing Edith to accompany him. Bertie wasn't even going to New York as himself, fearing that he'd be ambushed at the airfield. Robert felt a cold chill run up his spine when he never even considered just how dangerous the situation was initially.

A few months passed without a word, till one day Edith had gotten a phone call. She didn't say a thing, she simply told Mary, of all people, to watch Marigold, and she left in tears. Suddenly, later that evening, Atticus arrived with the worst news that they could've imagined. Pinkertons had beaten Bertie into a coma, Rose had a mental breakdown, and San Sochi was burned to the ground … and worst, no one knew where George was. The last anyone had seen of the boy, he had drawn fire to get the Pinkerton's off Bertie and had disappeared into the snowy streets. That night they heard that a mercenary's horse was found wandering the back alleys of lower Manhattan and that every Pinkerton and Cop was kicking down doors in Chinatown and Hell's Kitchen. Robert was incensed that they had left George behind. He understood but could not forgive when Atticus said he had his own children and wife to think of when they shoved off. They had waited a month for George, under armed guard, but the Foreign Office's tips led them to believe that he was on the run out of the city, heading south. There were rumors of a running fight at a rail junction in Cashtown Pennsylvania. Cora wanted to go looking for him, but they were stonewalled by a lack of funds. Downton was supporting the house, the village, and Tom and Mary's slumping car business. The factories in Ripon were about to be shuttered and the whole town was fixing to explode. They simply didn't have the funds to go questing the Mason-Dixon Line looking for one twelve year old boy that could be anywhere.

The only person that had the ability to do so was Edith, who returned on weekends from Saint Bartholomew's Hospital and buried her nose in books of American railway systems and poured over maps of Maryland and Virginia. No one had seen Edith so passionately focused on anything in her life. After a month of studying, while everyone despaired, the woman grabbed Marigold and took off for America, assuming her husband's responsibilities and diplomatic privileges.

It was only afterward did they learn that Mirada Pelham, Edith's Mother-In-Law, had begun filing legal paperwork for her son to be under her sole legal custody, along with Marigold. The stalwart, moralistic, woman had held George to blame for Bertie's situation. Moreover she was convinced that the boy was a criminal and that the rumors coming out of New York were true of his heinous deed in 'Dutch Town' on Halloween. She attempted to hold Edith's position, marriage, and custody of Marigold hostage, by forcing the Marchioness to sign an official document that denounced George and pressed Man-Slaughter charges against him. Had Edith signed it, she knew if George returned to England, she'd give the authorities the right to shoot him on the spot as a fugitive if they so wished. And she knew that she'd never be able to return to Downton if she did that. Nor would she be able to live with herself. Something had happened, something bad, Rose's docile, traumatized, condition was evidence enough. She trusted that George had done the right thing, that whatever he did, it was to protect Rose. So she refused to sign it, even when Lady Mirada threatened to expose the secret of Marigold to the world.

She had left in the night with just one chance to bring George home before the other Lady Pelham brought the world down on her. But not even Sir Anthony Strallan had brought Edith so low as when she returned to Downton. She was empty handed, disheveled, and defeated. Robert nearly gave himself a heart attack to learn that the Tennessee and New York State Police Forces had the nerve to imprison his daughter and Granddaughter. But it wasn't the imprisonment before deportation that killed Edith. It was that they had lost George.

Long after would Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, sit in the dark and despair of the imagery in his head of the things that Edith had told him. Both Edith and Marigold were treated like captive guests of the Governor and his wife, all the privileges of a titled, rich, white woman could receive in 'The South' of America and as a great societal jewel in New York. But it was the story that a sobbing Edith had told in the private of Cora and Robert's bedroom that would haunt the master of Downton Abbey till his dying day.

Edith had found George in the City of Memphis. It was hard to miss a young boy, shivering in the cold grey afternoon, on the side of a country highway, chained by the ankles to older boys. A local deputy was shouting at him to pick up the hammer pace. George had been imprisoned in Memphis and sentenced to three years on a chain gang, based on no charges but vague delinquency. He was ragged, hungry, and had been beaten up by the guards while protecting a sick boy that had gone down with the cold. When Edith left their room in defeat, Robert had sat in his chair by their bed and wept into his wife's chest in their privacy. George Crawley, their grandson, was the heir of an ancient estate, a famed name … and they had put him, Robert's boy, in chains to break rocks in the freezing cold till he hopefully starved to death. Those men, those animals, had imprisoned his children, had made them suffer. Now Edith had a prison record to go against her in the legal troubles. Marigold, the sweetest girl who ever lived, was so desperately sad and afraid every day. And George had once again slipped through their fingers, nowhere to be found.

The insurmountable sadness of watching the vicious court battles Edith was fighting with Lady Mirada just to hold onto a life that was disappearing daily. To lying next to a frightened Marigold every night, too afraid to sleep by herself lest someone come and take her away while she was sleeping. All the sadness turned to anger that ever bordered on the cusp of hatred. And slowly, shamefully, Robert had turned that anger on George. Did he not understand what his absence from this family, what the cost of his spiteful attitude toward Mary had wrought? Did he not care that Marigold slept between him and Cora every night, hiding, burrowing, between them so that no one could see her if they came to take her away? Did he not care that Edith was losing everything, her magazine, her daughter, her happy life? Was spiting Mary, was fighting Klansmen and cultist magicians, was his _**damn fool**_ , idealistic, Crusade more important than restoring his family's and his own honor? Cora and Edith had rushed off to Amantha upon FBI questioning of what had been going on there, some guerrilla war. Cora had requested that Robert come along with them. But he had broken his own wife's heart when he refused.

After everything that had happened, Robert didn't want, couldn't stand, to see George.

"You look like you need this more than I do …"

A hand held a glass of whiskey out to the reminiscing old man. The world seemed to be filled with much more shadows than he thought when he tore his eyes from the entrancing flames in the fireplace. He followed the attached hand to the bearded face of Hugh "Shrimpie" MacClare. The old man looked tired, wearied till his old soul was near threadbare. Robert, sadly, knew firsthand what a mourning daughter did to you. Their torment, their sorrow, and the helplessness of a father in those situations, it drained the life out of you. To see your precious girl in such pain that could not be made better turned you old quickly. Robert's white hair came from Sybil's death, and his wrinkles from the months after Matthew's. He wasn't sure if he'd survive Baby Cora and Henry had Mary actually took the time to mourn them, rather than shut down completely. But while Robert was an experienced and lodged rock, gone smooth after so many crashing waves, Shrimpie just seemed lost in a fog.

"I doubt that very much entirely." Robert rejected his old friend's sentiment and took the drink none-the-less. The two fathers of the same sweet woman toasted without a word and knocked back the yellow liquid. They both sighed as they took in the drink, savoring the smooth drop and burning stop that filled their gut.

"I haven't eaten since this morning. I'm afraid any more of this, and I might make dinner more entertaining than this evening needs." Robert lifted his glass with smirk of friendliness. He placed it on the fireplace mantle and looked out over his crowded library.

"After the day we've had, old chap, I'd say we need more than this to find entertainment tonight." Shrimpie shook his head as he poured himself a new one.

The old Earl lifted his eyebrows and nodded in agreement. Suddenly someone let out a haughty laugh that broke the murmuring reserve of the room. As if recognizing it, Shrimpie downed his glass in fortitude. She was a woman in a crimson, tight nylon, gown. A black choker with a ruby was at the center of her throat. She had nut brown hair and a bird like nose. But she carried impeccably aristocratic good looks on a slender frame. The belle was emphatically conversing with several older men who had gathered around her in lust for good humor. She seemed to be the great bane of the Marquess of Flintshire's existence.

Robert stared at her for a moment, the grown woman's appearance reminding the Earl, as if he could ever forget of the news from upstairs. "How's Rose?" Robert asked loud enough for the lull in the excited conversation on the red couch to overhear the question. The beaked nose woman had a practiced smirk that was turned toward the two older men. She knew the game Robert was playing, and she couldn't care less for it.

"Yes, Papa, how is dear, _dear,_ Rose?" Lady Annabelle McCordle, Countess of Gosford, and eldest daughter of Hugh and Susan Flintshire asked in fax engagement.

She had Susan's look, and her maternal family's nose. It was quite easy to tell that Edith and Annabelle were relation. Only Rose, Mary, and Sybil had escaped 'the nose'. Rose's above average beauty, unexhausted enthusiasm, and endless capacity to love had come from Shrimpie's mother. It was what made her more popular and tolerable than her 'just' pretty sister. But Annabelle had saved her grudges and Jealousy for her cousin Mary.

As Susan carried a great spark of jealousy for many years of Robert's beautiful American wife who had been his choice and great love. The woman had bred her own daughter to nothing but rival Mary Crawley in everything they did. From the ballrooms and debutante teas of the London Seasons the two girls clashed in their young and teenage years. She had claimed victory in her marriage to the Viscount of Gosford Park. But when she saw Mary standing with her, supposed, middle class loafer of a country solicitor and how happy she was with Matthew Crawley … it was a hollow victory.

She soon learned why her mama found no satisfaction in marrying the Marquees of Flincher and holding it over the young and naïve Cora Levinson. She had resented how protective, proud, and doting Robert was of his little American princess, because, no one would ever love Susan the way Robert loved Cora. And it was a harsh lesson Lady Annabelle McCordle soon learned herself in just being at her cousin's wedding, seeing Matthew and Mary together that day. The Flintshire women might have the positions, but the Grantham women had love that would last forever. But unlike her mama who had come, for a while, to make peace with her jealousy. When Lady Annabelle heard that Matthew Crawley died on the day his wretched little half-breed was born, Annabelle McCordle simply said "Good …" and then ordered a picnic with a smile. Her and her Cousin Mary would be even in their unhappiness for the rest of their lives.

Robert knew all of these things about his cousin's daughter, but he refused to let it bother him tonight. Shrimpie just nodded as he savored the burn and the lag in his mind. Before he sighed and placed his glass down next to Robert's. He looked into the fire and shook his head as an answer. Robert nodded himself in understanding, hearing that Annabelle had already lost interest.

"She loved him …" Robert said mournfully.

"I wish there was something I could do, something I could say …" The old man looked ashamed in his feeling of inadequacy in paternal comfort as well as his inexperience in the realm of true love.

The Earl placed a hand on his friend's shoulder. "There's nothing that can be said. We can only be there for her." He nodded with a voice as stern and gentlemanly in comfort. "God only knows Cora and I have been through enough of this over the years …" He looked back into the fire.

"Mm …" Hugh grunted. "War is a terrible theater." His Scottish brogue had a hint of darkness in it. "There is nothing so terrible as being in it, and yet nothing as easier for a young solider when the real courage is for those who sit and wait." He spoke thoughtfully.

There was a pause of thought before Robert nodded in agreement. "Indeed …" The more he thought on it, the more he felt a weight on his heart. "Well said …" He trailed off sorrowfully. They were two men, two gentlemen of honor, who dreamt of youth. Not for themselves or for the freedom to do it all over again, but so that they didn't feel so blasted useless in times such as these. The creeping of old age seemed like a curse these days. They'd gladly take the place of the young soldiers that they loved. And today, both men would've given their lives to take the place of the pilots who gallantly saved theirs this afternoon.

The thoughts led them elsewhere. "How are the children?" Robert asked with genuine concern as if talking of his own blood. Shrimpie's answer was cut off by his daughter's flirty laugh nearby. Robert cut her a dirty look that he tried to sweep past her father. But the Marquees simply sighed apologetically.

"Rachel is heartbroken, she doesn't want to be trapped, hemmed in. She wanted to come down to dinner, but Cora and Edith didn't think it would be a good idea. Rose needs her. She's has too much Aldridge in her, that one, too strong to show how she truly feels. God love the girl." The Scotsman shook his head.

It seemed strange that though her first name was Victoria, no one ever seemed to call her that. Whether it was fondness for the Dowager Countess of Sinderby, or the lovely girl just looked more like a Rachel, they seldom used her right name. She was a girl that Robert felt sorry for. Rose's breakdown had hurt her worse of all. She had been a little girl who knew her mother long enough to notice when she was gone. Years spent in America left her quite friendless, with her only friend being her beloved mommy who refused to speak for years. As for her family, Lady Annabelle and Lord James her Aunt and Uncle on her mother's side, had several children, but their Grandmamma Susan didn't think it would be appropriate for them to consort with Rachel. Lord Flintshire thought it madness. He demanded that Susan, if not acknowledge Rachel as her own blood, not poison their family against the young girl. Susan replied back that it was neither his nor Rachel's family in the first place. If the girl wanted family there was always the Crawley's, that is, if they survived this Depression and their heir was even still alive. Both Sybbie and especially Marigold did their best to include Rachel. Atticus and Lady Sinderby were very thankful to Tom and Edith for raising such fine daughters that looked after the girl. She grew up on fun trips to Bath and London with her cousins, and laughing in the rain with them at the spring dances in old barns. While both Marigold and Rachel were still very young, Marigold barely being of age to enlist, there was no danger of Victoria Rachel Cora Aldridge falling under the envious shadow of greed that ran through Susan and Annabelle's blood. She was a good and virtuous girl with a fun, love filled childhood lived within this green, wholesome, countryside.

Robert nodded. "I dare say it will be a lot easier for her than for young Hugh in the long run." He knew how it sounded, but the truth of the situation that Rose and Atticus's young son found himself would be quite trying now.

The first Earl of Sinderby had died five years ago. Atticus had taken over quite deftly and Rose had willed herself into getting better in order to help him. But now that Atticus was dead as well, it all fell on the shoulders of an eight year old boy. He couldn't imagine the situation that the boy would have to grow up in. He often thought of the chaos that could've broken out if he had died with his cousins on the Titanic, if Matthew was forced to take over everything from the moment Murray had informed him. Now he could only think of the insanity if Matthew, Mary, Edith, and Sybil were all small children. He was only lucky that by the time George came along, the estate was well in hand. Mary and Tom had the run of the place and if anything were to happen to him he knew he could trust his daughter and son to look after it all.

There was regret, but hope in Shrimpie Flintshire's eyes. "He's a good lad." He couldn't help but look to his estranged daughter in the distance. "He's trying to be a good soldier, trying to be strong. But when a young child loses his father in such ways, it's hard to deal with, I imagine. The war, today, is more real for him than anyone else in this room at the moment." There was nothing but disappointment in self-reflection as he watched his own daughter chatter with a rosy smile on her lips.

For a long time the Earl watched his friend reflect before he continued. "Yes, well he still has you to guide him on how it all works." He encouraged quietly.

"Yes …" Shrimpie drew off. "Yes, of course he does." There was confidence in his voice now. "I must admit that what I know of children is very limited." He confessed ruefully. "There was the Boers, and then Imperial outposts, diplomatic work. I left Susan to manage the older children, and then you and Cora to manage Rose. To be honest …" He sighed in private. "I wasn't a very good father, Robert." He admitted. "And I don't know how much I'd know about being one to my name sake." He shook his head.

His mind went to his own son. Lord James MacClare, The Earl of Newtonmore, who lived in Oxford with his wife's family. James was a landless peer, who had nothing to gain and nothing to inherit. His money, any sort of revenue stream, came from whatever plans and societal cues that Susan had planned. His ex-wife seemed to not be happy unless she had someone to work on. It used to be Shrimpie, than it was Rose, and now she had settled on James. Susan had him wrapped around her little finger and he blamed his father for it. And could he blame his son for hating him, even if his mother encouraged it? He had ignored him his entire life, and then left him with nothing but incompetence and a small pension from the Foreign Office.

"I always thought I'd be a better father …" Shrimpie said. "I knew I didn't love Susan, but I always told myself that I'd love our children." Remorse came over him.

"My dear chap …" Robert sighed comfortingly. "You did, I know you cared for them a great deal." He placed his hand on his shoulder.

"Did I?" he asked. "Of course I did …" He agreed. "But caring for them wasn't the same as being there, trying to help them be better than us, Susan and I." He shook his head. "I tried in the beginning, but I'm afraid that I thought the task was just too hard. Fighting Susan's nature and trying to keep King Edward's vision of Europe as a giant family. And what was it all for when Queen Victoria's grandchildren could tear it all too asunder in their horrible war and left me with a sunken estate." He shook his head. "Now I'm the father of a ruined son who has nothing and is constantly reminded as such by his mother. The father of two daughters who have been risen by the same parents, in the same home, with the same blood in their veins. Yet, one treats the other as a stranger, no feeling, no caring for her suffering. It's as if she doesn't know her, wasn't there when she was born." Hugh languished with every chortle Annabelle gave as she manipulated the room to garner attention for herself.

Susan hadn't just tried to turn her children against the Crawley girls, but had turned them against one another. Like a Robber Baron, or American Carpet Bagger, she made her children fight and claw one another in competition, so that the penniless divorcée could hitch her wagon to the winner. She stoked the flame so that they might climb higher in their next battle, so that she could climb higher in their schemes. It was upon the backs of her children did she strive to live her opulent, vapid, and comfortable life in a position of societal power.

But she had no use for Rose from very early in her life. Robert had always seen his cousin as the dark mirror version of his wife. She was infatuated with Cora as much as she hated her. And her parenting was a dark mirror to theirs as well. From the time Annabelle was born she was raised from the cradle to combat and vex Mary, to prove that she was a better Lady, a better English debutante, than the half-American ever was. And once she had beaten Mary, James might, _might_ , marry her out of pity. So that way she could turn Mary against Cora and have her daughter under her rule. Obviously, Susan didn't expect the kind of cold, ruthless, and sharp witted person Mary would become. After that failed venture, word spread far and wide of the new and nontraditional way in which the Countess of Grantham was raising her youngest daughter Sybil. It seemed mad to fore-go a governess and for a mother to teach and care for her child herself. It was simply unheard of. But not to be outdone, Susan tried to take the same tact with Rose, and had failed miserably. Susan was controlling and easily angered by the flighty girl, while Cora had patience that stood on a foundation of love for Sybil, the prized gem of her and Robert's county crown.

Rose had grown up in a home filled with bullies, encouraged by her mother. Susan found Rose's happy, ecstatic, and loving personality troubling and unbefitting of a girl of her birth. And so she naturally had the older children beat down the girl every chance they could. Rose was forced and tricked into humiliating situations as a girl, trying so desperately to be included in her sister's group of friends. She was gladly the punching bag and whipping girl just so that she could be loved and wanted by her family. And when she didn't get her affection at home, she spread her love elsewhere, in hopes that it would be returned. In her schemes she was often taken advantage of and could have led to ruin, had she not been saved. From what Mary had told Robert at Duneagle, it seemed that Rose had found her fabled shining knight in Matthew. He had been the first person who had gone out of his way to show her the first true act of selfless kindness in her entire life. Mary surmised till this day, Rose would always be in love with Matthew. But in the years that Rose lived in Downton, Susan saw the Crawley's kindness and mutual love for Rose as Cora stealing her daughter. And for years afterward, she had disowned Rose, erasing any document that tied her to her. No one would know in sixty, seventy, years that Rose Crawley Aldridge was ever a MacClare at all.

And Shrimpie knew it was his fault.

"We've all made our mistakes, Shrimpie." Robert said gravely, regret in his chest with George's name echoing through his soul. "But we must make sure that when we see a chance to correct them, we must put our best foot forward and do it right." He nodded. "Because, I know this, chap." The old Earl turned his friend toward him. "Hugh loves you a great deal, and he is counting on you." There was a firm point to his finish.

"I feel much, much, the same." Just imagining his grandson running through the gardens, smiling and laughing, was a tonic to a sickened heart and troubled mind. "He drew me a picture the other day … It was him and I standing in front of the pyramids. He wants me to take him to Egypt. It seems your young footman John Bates has been telling him George's adventure stories while he cleans the silver." He smiled in deep fondness.

Robert smirked endearingly. "Yes, Cora has gotten a few drawings herself. He's got a fair amount of talent as an artist." The older man commented encouragingly.

"I certainly don't know where he might have gotten it from. Poor, darling, Rose couldn't trace her own hand, and I don't recall Atticus being any great painter. Perhaps Lady Rachel has some hidden talent we are unaware of." He said thoughtfully.

"Must be Lady Rachel …" Robert scoffed. "Cause I couldn't imagine Lord Sinderby being some great artist of our time." He smirked.

A genuine laugh echoed through the library, the first in so long since the dark affair began. "I'd say not, indeed." The two grandfathers smiled quietly.

"Well …" Shrimpie concluded. "Who am I to argue with a man with the experience?" He wasn't happier, he didn't feel better, but there was a shaky optimism for the future. There was a new conviction to get it right this time.

"No, not experience …" Suddenly a deep sorrow and regret fell on Robert like an avalanche. His thoughts of the memories of a boy he had pushed away blanketed him with an old pain. "Just regret, a lot of regret of the things an old fool should've done when he had a chance." He replied in a deeply pained voice. "I'm, uh, I'm sorry." His voice shook and a single tear fell down his eye. "I don't mean too …" He cleared his throat.

But Shrimpie simply placed a hand on Robert's forearm warmly as the old man turned his back to the crowded library, bracing himself against the mantle. After several heavy breaths, he patted Hugh's bracing hand on his arm. When the man let go, he cuffed the Earl on the back. He didn't have to say anything, he didn't need too. The support, the friendship, and over all the understanding was implicit in years of knowing one another.

Shrimpie had lost a Son-In-Law. Robert had most likely lost his last heir, his grandson, and another child.

The Marquees nodded sadly, understanding that Robert needed a moment. Slowly he moved away, tapping the man on the shoulder to let him know that he was going. Robert breathed harshly.

"Shrimpie …" he called after his companion.

The man paused and turned. "What is it, Robert?" He asked sympathetically.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words seemed to come out. He looked down pensively, before he felt it come.

"Don't … don't force him to be something he's not. Don't make the mistakes I did, for god sake, Hugh … don't, don't make him into a savior, don't make him into an ideal son, a-a … a …" He stuttered in his desperation to be heard. Finally he paused and cleared his throat to collect himself. "Just let him be your grandson." He nodded with all the could-have-been of a hundred yesterdays crowded around his broken heart.

"Of course, old chap. Of course I will, for both of us." Shrimpie nodded comfortingly, conveying whole heartedly that he heard him. His eyes were glassy, but there was nothing but sincerity and nobility in his promise. As he walked away, Robert watched him.

"M'Lord …"

There was something comforting to the sound of Mr. Carson's steady and bass trembled voice. It was a sound meant for the stage, but content to be an active member in Lord Grantham's life and his children's lives. The Old butler seemed somehow shrunken in the last several years, always a large and imposing man; he seemed frail today than he had in so many years of service. He had retired half-a-dozen times already, always saying that this day or that would be his last day. But he was a creature of habit, a creature of a time long past. He would not be happy in the home that he and Mrs. Hughes had built for themselves in the village. And when he was told by his wife of the surprise party that had come to Downton, he was more than willing to take his role as Senior Butler once again. It was Mary who asked for him, and on a night like tonight, that was all he needed to know to come as fast as he could. He thought he might find Thomas to cause the usual fuss of wanting to take over permanently, but he hadn't seen the man since they arrived.

"Dinner is served, M'Lord." Carson had his trembling hands placed behind him. Robert nodded and then looked up to find the old man staring at him with all the sympathy in the world. They had seen some trouble in their day, but there were only two of them that had ever been this bad. Mary must have told him, he was sure that she had to have told someone, for her own piece of mind. If there was anyone in the world she would tell, it would've been Anna and Carson.

"Yes …" Robert tried to nod. "Of course, umm ..." He turned to the crowded library, at all of the fancy dressed tux and tail men and gowned women that were chatting and sipping drinks. He opened his mouth, but he failed to find the words. He felt tired, drained, and beside himself with sorrow. He seemed to forget what he was even supposed to be doing there in the first place.

"That's dinner everyone! If you'd please follow Carson to the dining room."

When both men turned they found Lady Grantham at the doorway. She wore a white satin gown with golden designs on the bodice that matched her silk opera gloves. A see through fabric held up the dress on her milky shoulders. She was a vision of heaven to a heart weary husband at the end of his rope. It was amazing that there were only a few stray strands of white in the net of the timeless beauty's tresses of raven curls. She had not escaped age, but there was elegance she wore it with, like a perfect pearl necklace. Even in their older years there was something striking, breath taking, about his wife. There was a deep romanticism in her old world elegance and look that attracted people to her still.

"Uh …" Carson turned to Robert, who still had the ability to smirk at the command his wife could usurp at will. He shrugged and waited on Carson patiently. The look on the older lord's face was one of pure loving amusement at all their years together and still his Cora had the ability to catch Carson off guard.

"Very good, your Ladyship." He bowed respectfully and turned to the crowd. "M'ladies, M'Lords, if you'd follow me." Steadily Carson led the way to the door.

As the people filed by, Cora smiled, whispered a familiar greeting, and shared a few words. She was a perfect hostess, half a century of perfecting the balance between management and social lubrication. But between her duties, she kept an eye out into the Library. She watched Robert in the distance. In their gaze were a dozen emotions and thoughts that they conjoined and put together wordlessly. Her dark blue eyes were lightened and deeply sympathetic for the longing inside her. And when Robert met her eyes across the room, she gave the most broken of little smiles.

They had been through this too many times before.

Tonight they'd come together, hold onto one another, and never, ever, let go. But for now all that they could do was look out longingly at one another. Robert envied her, envied the problem she thought they were facing. Atticus's death they could've managed, Rose's sorrow they knew how to handle, and heartbroken children could be loved. But Cora didn't know what everyone else did. She didn't know about what was lying out in that one horrible place where their eldest daughter's dreams seemed to go to die.

He remembered the first time she thought he had died in Cincinnati. She never wanted to speak to Robert again. And then when she thought Van Houten had gotten him in New York several years later. She had Mrs. Hughes categorize all the things worth selling in Downton. If they couldn't afford to go find George, then she'd make the money somehow to go find him herself. And he remembered the distantly sorrowful look that was on her face as she looked out the window to the grey horizon at tea time in the years after New Orleans. There had been no word again of George in his self-exile into the Southwestern badlands after the funerals in the Runaways final battle. And it was more the same in the last four years of his permanent exile in the Holy Land and North Africa.

Robert sometimes forgot that his wife had lost their unborn son as much as he had. He forgot sometimes that in the years after Baby Cora, as well as before and after America, that his wife was George's only mother. From the unknown reason for his fallout with Edith, and Isobel's delusions, Lady Grantham was the boy's only consistent mother figure all of his life. And after the loss of their unborn child and Sybil, after the being removed from hospital presidency, George had given Cora a reason, had given her a purpose. He had made her a parent again and all the emotions of anger, exasperation, and unconditional love that came with it. She had loved that boy with all of her soul, had invested so much time and energy in him. It seemed wrong to not tell her about what had happened.

But there was never a chance. Even as he opened his mouth, the young Duchess hooked her into a conversation about activities for tomorrow. It was as if there was no war at all to these people. When the door closed there was a mournful quiet that filled the library, like the solemn silence that fell over a church before a funeral. Robert found himself alone in the shadowy room lit by candles and the glowing fireplace. Outside there was a distant boom of thunder that vibrated the window panes, a new band of storms were on their way.

The low rumble in the roar made it sound like a monster, a great dragon, had come to the very gates of the castle. The beast's vile evil and cruelty was drawn to the darkness, the sickness at the heart of Downton. It had felled their champion, their future, and now the scaly devil had come for the riches, the cursed objects that had meant so much to so many other men before him. It had come to sack this rotted and decrepit country palace. It would throw down all the sundries, paintings, and pottery in the middle of the foyer, all the work and legacy of seventeen Earls of Grantham and lay upon the hoard. It was useless treasure, but its value inflated by count of foolish men, like himself, afraid of the future.

In the quiet, the Earl of Grantham knew that there was a dragon, a wicked beast. But it wasn't at his gates, it was in the room with him, it was inside him. The dragon _was_ him. He had slayed the future of his house, of their name, with his pride, with his fear. He had wanted to be like those great gentlemen whose portraits hung from the walls of Downton Abbey. He took pride in his place of the world and tried to move with the times. But he lost sight of his way, lost sight of what was important. This place, these things, they were all the family would have. He thought it was what made them the Crawley's, their legacy. But in seeing himself as a custodian, he forgot that it wasn't the items, or the house, that were the treasures.

Slowly he wandered back to the mantle and looked over the true fortune of Downton.

A young girl, it seemed too young to be in a RAF uniform, stood in the frame of a black and white picture. The teenage girl had a tight pencil skirt, a blazer with wings sown into her lapel, and a rectangular hat fit over the top of her head. She was the most beautiful Arthurian maiden that had ever worn a military uniform. She had skin the color of a winter's moon, and shoulder length ringlets that fell out of her cap perfectly. Even if there was no color in the picture, one could only imagine how brilliant the gold in her locks shined in the spring sun. Marigold Drewe Crawley looked shy but happy to be standing in her uniform for the first time. She saluted the camera as she stood in front of Downton. Robert remembered how Edith practically glowed that day. She was somehow relieved that Marigold wouldn't have to do any fighting and yet bursting with pride that her girl had chosen to serve King and Country in such uncertain times. Edith must have taken two dozen pictures that afternoon, before Mary, annoyed with the constant flash of the bulb, snatched the camera away from her.

Robert had not known the length of his incredible stupidity for how long it took him to warm to this perfect ray of ethereal light. She was sweet, kind, and caring. She was quiet, rarely spoke up, but when she did something it was done with the intention of love behind it. Fore their little Marigold was only happy when the people she loved were. He only wished that she was here, that he could hold her hand, and love her in these trying times of the heart.

On the other side of the mantle was another picture frame. Just staring at it had never failed to make Robert smile with all that made him. One might have confused the girl in the picture for a ghost of the past, any ghost you picked. A phantom of the Gilded Age, a fair American Princess who had captured a young Viscount with just a soft "Excuse Me" as she passed him in London. Or if you squinted she could be the ghostly figure of the prized and fiery gem of Downton that had given birth to the girl. But in the trickster smile of mischievous charm upon her glossy lips, she was all her own soul given to her by her rebel mama. Sybbie Branson's long black curls looked disheveled and out of place, her blue uniformed blouse was immodestly unbuttoned and had oil stains. Her smudged pencil skirt had a torn slit on each side that ran up her creamy legs. Unlike Marigold, her high heels had been replaced by an extra pair of men's boots that came up to her thighs. She took great pleasure in teasingly snuggling in a familiar double breasted leather coat that was too big on her. Her beautiful pearly smile shined through her dirty appearance as she leaned against a wing of a specially modified Spitfire that was last seen crashed and burnt out on the side of the road. The gorgeous mechanic, referred to by all the chaps in love with her as "The Star of the County Grantham", playfully posed against the fighter in a pin-up, 'cheesecake' posture, most likely to annoy its pilot whose jacket and extra pair of boots she had stolen. When her pilot threatened to send the picture to their grandparents, Sybbie left a lipstick kiss and autographed it _"Too the little people I had to step on to get here."_ He sent it anyway, not knowing that it would be Lord Grantham's favorite picture of his favorite little girl.

There was something special, unique, and everlasting in Robert's relationship with Sybbie, his granddaughter. There was something to say about the girl being his first grandchild, and something sentimental to her being the only piece of his youngest daughter he had left. She was Sybil's little girl, her beautiful and everlasting gift in this world. And Robert cherished her so closely and loved her so deeply. The two of them were close, closer than his relationship with his own daughters when they were her age. Sybbie could do no wrong, and no matter what she had done, her Donk would always be on her side. It created a great many headaches for Tom and Mary as she grew up and embraced her more trouble-making and vixen like side. She was a perfect storm of Sybil's rebellious spirit, Mary's sense of humor, and Cora's timeless beauty all bred to perfectly wrap her Donk around her little finger forever.

But between the pictures was one in particular that hung above the mantle. Slowly he reached above and took it down. He held it in his hand for a long quiet moment. He took a deep breath and stared at the glass frame and searched it for some sort reprieve, hoping that there was some sort of forgiveness to be found in what was inside. But he found nothing but regret stir in him.

When the young man returned after eight years of being absent, he seemed like a stranger with all the painfully familiar reminders of Robert's past. He was no longer the little chap in tweed and tie, a visible reminder of Matthew. He had transformed himself out there in the wild, lawless, continent that Depression had ravished. Lord Grantham was determined to put him back on the right path, bestow his wisdom, his responsibility onto the next generation. But when he thought he'd find Matthew born again, he could only find a young man with Sybil's face, Sybil's prejudices, and Mary's disdain for authority. He had no use or interest in a legacy he only had contempt for. Robert told himself that he could give him time, as he had Matthew when he first arrived. The boy would come to see the need to put aside the adventurer and become who he was meant to be. But it never came, and any attempt to put him back on the road that Robert had been deftly put on when he was the boy's age, was met with open rebellion. Eton, Oxford, the Royal Army, and Downton were names, not a path to a rebellious youth. To angry demands why he never even showed up to interviews at prestigious and fancy schools, he simply replied "I pick my own books …" and would leave the library with Robert crimson faced and speechless in outrage. The boy, despite being only sixteen, already had a High School Diploma. He claimed he took a test in Eagle Pass. Robert claimed that it was a forgery, but the youth simply looked him in the eye and challenged him to prove it. No British Solicitor would spend the time or the considerable danger to travel to the American and Mexican Border in Southwest Texas to confirm a High School Diploma.

His expectations, his fantasies for so long became a nightmare. Slowly it filled him with helpless anger and resentment. In every disrespectful snubbing of invites, dinner eaten downstairs with the servants rather at dinner with his family, and claims of "better things to do" when they went on a family outing, Lord Grantham felt his and Mary's poor decision being lobbed in his face. Cora did her best to play peacemaker, but it was no use. The young man and Mary couldn't stand one another, and what hurt most was that he saw Robert as a dumb old man in love with "useless stuff" as he put it. No matter how many times his wife told him that he can't "force Matthew out of Mary" he couldn't accept that he would be the last. The flame would once again go out with Robert dropping the torch, because, of a poor decision that he never truly weighed the consequences of.

The item in Lord Grantham's hand was a gift from Atticus and Rose for Cora's birthday. Inside was a British Flag folded into corners at the top. Down the right side of the large frame was a patch of a black knight's helmet, which resembled the Black Knight, the mascot of Rogue Squadron. They were a little chivalrous, a little villainous, and always a terror to their enemy. Below the emblem were two medals for valor. One was earned for heroism during Dunkirk for saving the medical frigate filled with wounded soldiers from Stuka dive bombers. The other came from saving a London orphanage from a formation of 109s during Eagle Day.

Across from the patch and medals was a picture. A young man was in the middle of a desert. Both his grown out curls and a navy blue scarf, made by Isobel before his trip to America, were caught in the high morning breeze. He wore goggles around his neck, a beaten double breasted coat of mahogany colored leather over his athletic frame, and matching supple leather boots on his feet. They were all items that could be spotted on Sybbie in the other picture. Halfway up a rusted yellow ladder to the sleek and silvery Thunderfighter, George Crawley turned to the face the camera. In the hour of the "Chevalier Run" a Zionist reporter had asked what the young racer pilot thought of Herman Goering comment that "The Aryan superiority will show today." The boy had turned to face the media …

There was something unequivocally George in the most dashing and heroic figure he cut with just a hint of a cockiness touching his smirk.

Now, holding the glass frame in hand, he saw that he was the last Earl. It was another poor decision of his that had ended his line. Robert had pushed his heir, his child, away rather than embrace him. He let his bad decisions fester rather than fix them. He had rather burn the whole place down, cut off his own right hand, rather than accept that he had made a grave mistake. He had made the same mistake with Sybil, had pushed her away, made things hard and awkward for her, because she went against him. And she had died before she ever knew how much her papa had come to love and absolutely rely on the only man she had ever loved. How many more times, he wondered, staring at the frame, would he be too late to understand his own mistakes? The answer had come already too late by the time that same inconsiderate disappointment had come back to rescue his family and gave his life for theirs.

"My dear boy … I'm sorry … I'm so sorry for everything!"

Thunder rumbled in the distance that rattled the loose items in the silent room. And when the noise receded all that was left was an old man crying alone in his library.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

 _The Plaque – Jerry Goldsmith (Lord Grantham and the Pictures)_

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _I didn't like this chapter so much._

 _The idea of these next couple of chapters was to tell the story from the opposing side. The theory and the attempt, at any rate, were to create sympathy for Robert and Mary. But I don't think I did a very good job._

 _Also this chapter and next one are gonna be complicated. This chapter was not supposed to have ended here. But in my attempt to recreate the show's structure and formula in these next couple of chapters I broke down the narrative into an odd number of sections rather than construct them as full chapters. But this one was running long. So, next chapter will actually have three sections rather than the standard two._

 _I haven't done three since my Sarah Connor Chronicles days … so here's hoping._


	19. The Masque of the Red Death - Part II

**The Masque of the Red Death: Part II**

 _A Timeless Lullaby_

In the stormy evening there was a growing darkness that infected the corridors of the stately Downton Abbey. In the decades past, the installment of electricity and consistent light fixtures on the walls made Downton seem like a normal house, light reflecting off white halls. But in fourteen years, beyond the mundane of day to day routine, there was something different about wandering the corridors. There was an unnatural darkness, shadows that grew like ivy on ruins around the lights. It was a deep and thick black that overshadowed the electrical lamps. It was like a meaty froth that blanketed everything, trapping the light in a bulbous sphere that cast no visibility. Trapped and eaten by darkness, there was no point to the light when it did nothing. And in the cold emptiness, the shadows spread like the long molesting talons of a witch's cruel crone's fingers over the majestic splendor.

This was not the Downton Abbey that Lady Mary Crawley had known and grown up in. The halls were always clean, the atmosphere pure, and the glow of the lights brought warmth to the heart that always felt like home. It was the mark of a happy childhood and a wholesome house filled with love. She and everyone else had taken for granted that this was the way it had always been. Many friends and family had always come to the manor as a way of retreat from the world. There was a certain magic to the place that couldn't be replaced. Of all the horror and scandals that went on in other estates, plagued with horrid unhappiness, Downton had always stood above everything else. But it only occurred to Lady Mary tonight, now that she had been fully awoken after fourteen years of frigid hibernation, just how things had changed. She felt as if she was a cursed fairy tale princess awoken from slumber after five hundred years. The paper at the tops of the walls was starting to crack, and from underneath the first signs of mold was starting to appear. Thick, dusty, cobwebs had begun to intertwine the light fixtures that lined the corridors, and outside the bedroom windows grime and vine begun to cling and glue itself to the glass in deep stains of neglect. And down the long hallways, covered in plush crimson carpets and hanging portraits, there was an outcropping of impassible darkness.

In the rumble of outside thunder, torrents of rainfall, and violent winds, whispered voices, silhouetted staring figures and strange noises seemed to move in corridors. The battle, killing, and moldering dead alone in the fields had stirred the atmosphere of Grantham County. Like stricken metal or the pluck of a taut out of tune harp, the air seemed to hum with an odd frequency. Its echo vibrated through the countryside off heart, hillside, and graveyard. It's strange alarm stirred restlessness of the supernatural in old sins that took the shape of phantoms and monsters that haunt dreams and the waking mind. Things long dormant and asleep were now slowly congregating to the county seat and wandering the dark halls of the decrepit castle, their chains clinking behind them as they checked room to room for their haunts. In them were malice, neglect, and hatred that would not leave till they had wrapped the manifestation of their sins about their mark's neck and forever scream the reminders of their great shame till they could think of nothing else.

And tonight, all of them had come to gather around the frigid beauty that stood in the dark. Their shadows and faces twisted about the single flame of a candle in her hand. They said and looked like everything that she had spent so many years trying to close herself away from. Kemal Pamuk was silent and unmoving. His dead eyes stared blankly at her, maybe for hours, maybe for years. What he was waiting for, on the very carpeted track she had once carried his dead body on, she didn't know, and neither did he. Kemal was dead, because of her. She had taken his life in her lust and what had it all been for? He haunted her for the answers that she might never know. Henry was mourning Charlie Rogers by her feet, telling her how much he needed her. She had wanted to shout at him in frustration that she had married him for God's sake! How much more of her did he want? And then …

She heard a baby crying when the thunder rumbled.

For a heartbeat she was all instinct again. She didn't know where it came from, didn't even remember that she had it in her at all, much less still. Voices and figures taking shape in her mind from the complexions of the violent storm outside gripped and snapped at her feet. It was all the guilt, all the wrongs that she had done, the tragedies that had befallen her, and the inescapable sorrow that had haunted her for so long. Yet, she didn't flinch at anything when she heard a baby, a little girl, crying from her crib in the nursery. She dashed quickly in her tight and long satin evening gown across the dim and shadowy overlook to the other wing of the manor. She didn't stop till she had reached the front of the nursery. The squealing was louder now. She held the candle aloft as she pushed open the door. The name of the little girl died in her throat when she saw just vine covered glass and a dusty window sill. There was nothing inside but relics of a past tragedy that remained untouched since it happened. No one had cleaned it, no one had reordered it, repurposed it. And no one had gone inside the room since it happened …

That was, no one, but one.

He had pulled up a chair and sat for many long hours inside as the house slept. The brooding and tormented youth, about to leave for France and enlist in war, held onto a pediatric vial in his hand and closed his eyes. He sat by the abandoned crib till the sun had come up on that Christmas morning. The youth had waited for absolution, for forgiveness, for some meaning to come from it, to come to him. But he never found it. There was no comfort or closure to his long night in the empty room. But as the young man left, he turned when he thought he heard a baby. His heart was aflutter and there was, for a moment, hope that the smallest and greatest of treasure stolen on a Christmas morning was all just a dream. But, memory melted to reality, and what he thought was a little girl was just the crackle of frost on the old window pane. Head bowed in the defeat of an old pain and memories, he left with a quiet click of the door. In the hallway he had come face to face with a shocked Anna Bates.

The Lady's Maid, who was retrieving her children's Christmas presents from their hiding places, looked surprised and overjoyed to see him so suddenly after years of exile. He had grown up so much since she had last seen him, the desert and the hardships of adventure had deftly done away with the boy in him, but she'd still know that young man anywhere. But her joy was short lived when she saw in his eyes that he had not come home to stay or be seen. She saw where he was leaving from and what was in his hand. Suddenly Anna remembered what day it was. She had been the only other person who had been there, witnessed what cruel injustice had been done to that noble and courageous boy that day. Anna's eyes grew glassy and her entire body and soul hurt for him when she reached out her slender arms. There was never a look of a soul who didn't feel worthy of someone's sympathy or maternal comfort then the young man that turned and walked away. Years later he still blamed himself for what had happened and no one could convince him that it wasn't his fault. They had relied on him, _**the baby**_ had relied on him, and he choked when it had mattered the most. When that family he let down, their friends, and guests came down to celebrate Christmas Eve that day they were none the wiser of who had been there. On that Christmas morning, one last time, a young man held his final vigil at his little sister's side.

There was no pomp, or teary goodbyes as George Crawley left for France. The young master simply, wordlessly, slung his jangling pack on his back and disappeared through the manor's front doors and into the snowy Yorkshire dawn as Downton Abbey, his family, slept. For a moment he stood in the doorway, looking out into the purple and orange stained glass horizon of Christmas morning. His body was wound tightly, as he suddenly punched his fist into an open palm three times in excision of old wounds and doubts. Then, with a frothing breath, he adjusted his pack and walked into the morning dawn. In his leaving, he knew in the coming hatred of the overwhelming Nazi onslaught …

That he would likely never see home again.

The screws in the window rattled and squealed loudly, the rusting on the hinges creating what sounded like the call of a toddler. Red tinted eyes used the dim candle to scan the empty room. A single tear stained Lady Mary's cheek in the doorway of the tomb where her family, her happiness, had been buried. A heavy avalanche of guilt and regret burdened Mary Crawley's heart as she gave one last glance at a room that she'd never have any use for ever again. She placed her hand on the doorknob and slowly she began to close it. The tear was hot on her cold cheek as she stopped only for a second.

"Goodnight … wherever you are, my sweetest girl."

Quietly she closed the door with a tightened throat, cleaning her cheek with a gloved hand. She sniffled harshly in the overpowering darkness that surrounded the manor and the west wing. A deep loneliness fell over her, and inside, she felt as how the house looked. Tired, rotting, and ruined. She was a beautiful shell covered in cobwebs and ropes of vine where such nostalgia of the past and lost love was coveted. And it only got worse as she stood outside of the nursery, the very spot of her greatest mistake. The last time she had been standing here, she had been desperate, unhinged, and betrayed by human fallacy and emotions. In her rush of despair and grief, she had done something so horrible, so unforgivable, that she had cut herself off from existence rather than ever look for forgiveness and redemption. Even as she did it, she knew that there was no going back. You never stopped feeling like a mother, but after what she had done to her child … she had no right to call herself his mother, much less a mother at all. And so she had given up such claims in her heart and head. For fourteen years, no matter what anyone had told her, she knew that she was right to withdraw any distinction that she deserved to be in her child's life. Every time she had the inkling, the ghost of awakening from her punishment and pendence, her mistake was there to remind her that she would never escape the horrible thing she had done one Christmas morning, long ago.

With the incident on her mind, she heard the sound of feet near the staircase. Looking down the hallway, she saw a shadowy figure standing at the descent. They were facing her, looking at her down the long corridor. For just a moment she was back in time, back to that morning, standing in the exact same spot. It was like her nightmares all over again. It was a frozen, grey, morning that promised to be the beginning of a long and great celebration. Inside the room was a great evil of circumstance and fate's folly to which nothing, _nothing_ , could be done. A woman in a long silken nightgown was standing were Mary was. The woman turned, like Mary did, to the figure in the shadows. And then she saw something in her desperation, something that was always there, inside the little child, but was not for her to take advantage of. So many times in her deepest nightmares, did Mary scream and plead for the woman not to do it, to spare the child. She screamed and begged for him to run away from the monster, but he couldn't hear her, nobody could. Each time she bared witness to the small boy agreeing, without hesitation, to make a doomed charge for a lost cause. A small, innocent, good, such a good boy, locked forever in a race that could never be won and would never end.

Now that she was in the shadows of things that were. Her mind, heart, and soul were locked in that moment of time. It felt like her heart would explode. It was ghosts, sins, and emotions she had spent so many years trying to avoid that had now overtaken her like the rising of a tide after a broken dam. Her heart was in her throat and her pulse was pounding as the figure continued to stand in the dark, slowly walking toward her.

"George …" She whispered hoarsely.

She slowly began to walk toward the figure. It felt like it was yesterday. It was the same fear, the same desperation, but under different circumstances. This time she felt the burning madness to go to that same heroic boy, with his father's heart and all his love for her. She wanted to fall to her knees, scoop him up in her slender arms, and tell him that it wasn't his fault. She was going to protect him. She'd always be there for him. Do everything that she knew that she had no right to do after that morning, after what she had done what she had to him.

"George!" She said hopefully.

The figure took a step forward. "Mary?" A familiar voice called in confusion from the top of the staircase.

All the air, all the hope, and a true moment of emotion left the woman as she stopped. Reality came crashing over her. Memories and consequences of the life she chose collapsed back on top of her. Lady Mary's heart broke again when the cobwebs, mold, and vines of her destroyed world returned to the slow decaying castle. It wasn't her boy, her brave hero, watching her from where he had once stood.

"Edith …" Mary cleared her throat.

Her younger sister's face was illuminated by her candle as the two women met at the overlook above the foyer below. The Marchioness was made up lovely for the splendid dinner party waiting. But there was no amount of make-up or jewels that could hide the sadness and worry on the golden woman's face. She had spent a better part of the evening with Mama, trying to comfort Rose and the children. And like a nurse in an influenza ward, she seemed to have caught the virus. The specter of loss and abyss of sadness had physically touched the woman in her long exposure to it. She looked drained of emotion, tired, and yet all of the echoes of the day's madness seemed to cling to her still. It was times like this that only Marigold could save her from these fits. Yet, sadly, the girl was nowhere to be found.

"Were you …?" She started.

"I thought you were someone else." Mary cut her off quickly, lowering her candle.

"George?" Edith was unreadable in the dim light that framed the angles of the two sister's faces.

The eldest sister opened her mouth to protest, to cut at her, but she didn't. Just uttering the name took all Edith had not to cry. Being around Rose had shaken Edith badly and it was evident in the way she seemed to slink down in the dark. It had been so long, and it happened so often without her seeing it, that Mary had forgotten just how close George and Edith had been. It was a true wrench, even at her coldest, to hear just how much her boy had come to love Edith, how much he depended on her. It was selfish of Mary to think so, even when she didn't see herself as the boy's mother, but she couldn't help but feel that it was Edith's punishment for stealing Matthew from her when they were girls. Mary had taken Matthew and now Edith had stolen their son away. And she was ashamed to admit, even now, she couldn't fully let it go.

"Like I said, I was mistaken." Mary clipped as she tried to brush passed her sister to make her fashionable entrance into the Library before dinner.

"It's okay to miss him, Mary …" She stopped as Edith watched her go. "It's okay to be worried about him." She continued. "I … I am." Her voice cracked just a moment.

The crack made Mary close her eyes, contemptuous of the water forming in her own and the hurt in her heart at the noise her sister made. Wiping her eyes, she coldly returned to Edith and stood by her side, as she might stand by the guns at The Shoot. She was not a participant in helping her sister, but she wouldn't leave her alone. She kept the flame low as they stood silently for a long moment awkwardly. Edith took several deep breaths till she found composure. There was something very haunted about her sister that had everything to do with how she had spent her evening.

Mary was actually surprised that Edith was the one helping comfort Rose. For years Edith had carried a grudge against the woman, laying blame on their 'sister' for a great many things. In 1930, Edith was furious at both Rose and Atticus to hear that they didn't, once, look for George. They were in the same city, and neither of them thought of looking for their nephew who was all alone for almost a year. Rose and Atticus was the very excuse Mary and Papa had used for sending the boy away. After they found George in San Sochi, Edith had made Rose promise, on pain of death, that she'd take guardianship over the boy. The woman even forced her to swear that she'd be as good an aunt as Rosamund. On correspondence with George and Rose, there was little to report. But Edith had come to hear from unnamed sources that it was George that was taking care of Rose, much more than she was him. It was amazing that for some reason, even though Rose had lived in New York longer, the boy knew the city and the people better.

The first time that Edith realized that something was wrong had been when George wrote about Atticus's new job at a Bank. Every one of Cora Levinson's children, whether from her body or once removed, had gotten 'the talk' if they were going to New York. You didn't ever, **ever** , trust a Knickerbocker. They were bitter, angry, and vile miscreants in fashionable, conservative, frocks. They'd backstab and humiliate you if they could. And it was all because you were simply one of Cora Levinson's babies. These were the things that George had warned Rose about, not forgetting the horrible harassment he had endlessly received since he got back to town after Wall Street crashed. They hated Granny and Donk like they were cancerous cells. Yet, somehow, Atticus was now working at their bank and Rose was making society calls as their "Friend". George kept telling Rose that Atticus was getting set up as a fall guy to take all the blame if something went wrong. No one in New York got arrested when they owned the banks, they found a good little Jew that they hated anyway and send him down river to Riker's Island. But Atticus was making "Stupidly ridiculous" money, while Rose and Madeleine were getting introductions into New York society. Rose told George that he could stop working, go back to school, hire servants, and she could get nannies and nurses again. They could even throw parties in San Sochi like the old days, before the crash.

This type of thinking caused George to send up the warning flare to Edith. George was naturally suspicious of people with power. Bertie had laughed in bed, telling her that George had become a Republican, and that Martha, a Southern Democrat, would just love that. But while Edith had smirked at the prospect of an Anti-Government, Zionist, rebel in the Peerage, it was something in George's letter that made her and Bertie start to worry.

Months later, Lady Edith wasn't stupid. She could piece enough together to know that when Senator Van Houten had placed a price on George's head, along with the bulletin that all of Papa and Mama's former nemesis were massacred, that whatever Rose got herself into, the consequences had fallen on their nephew. When Rose and Atticus returned to England, they had met Edith at the hospital. Bertie's entire face was bandaged and he hadn't awoken in a month. And what made it worse was the vain of it all when there was no George to be found. Rose had been traumatized for a month, but that didn't matter to Edith. Almost completely out of character, Lady Edith slapped her sister's ear back angrily. She shook the young woman in a rage, shouting that Mama and George had warned her repeatedly of getting close with those awful harpies. She angrily accused Rose of all of the bad things, George's bounty and Bertie's coma, being her fault. She reminded her angrily that she was supposed to have been watching George, that she was his guardian. She was supposed to have protected him, not the other way around. When they separated the two women, Rose's ear was bleeding and she slunk behind her husband as a small child who was hiding in shame.

When Rose came to live at Downton again, it took Edith, even across the dinner table, years to have anything to do with the young woman. And every time she came back from America, her detest only grew. Edith was the same old Edith for most of those years. But when Mary and Tom questioned when the Marchioness was going to forgive their sister, claiming that it was time to bury the grudge, Edith turned into someone else. She'd snap at them angrily. She, once, had rudely stated to Mary's claims upon her return from Memphis that "it couldn't be all that bad" that her older sister was talking a special kind of ignorant nonsense and to keep her mouth shut. It was the only time in their life that Edith had successfully silenced her sister. It was in the year between New York and New Orleans that Edith was always angry. It was such drastic changes that some on the staff had feared that she might 'accidentally' kill poor Lady Rose if they didn't hide the shotguns.

But it was the true difference between Lady Edith and everyone else. Mary could go on forever in her dislike of someone. Sybil never really hated anyone; she just found them laughable when thinking of their spite. But Edith was always the more compassionate one, the one who could take a punch and not punch back. Mary had always thought that it was because her sister had no spine. But now she knew it was because it was rare that the Marchioness of Hexham could turn her back on someone she loved. When George came back from his adventures in America, he, mysteriously, had wanted nothing to do with his Aunt Edith. Yet, she took his abuse and didn't once fight back. But she didn't retreat from trying to look after and love him either. And though Edith had spent years angry at Rose, when their youngest sister was suffering, she was the first to go to her. Rose could and often thoroughly wore Edith out over their life, but she still loved her and loved her niece and nephew. So she was there for them, to hold a hand, to give a hug, and hold someone tightly. She was the loneliest of souls, and as such, she carried the greatest kindness in her endless empathy that had been born of a tragically unlucky life.

It was just the way they had been raised. Mary had spent so many years loathing and in competition with Edith. But in this moment, when she saw her sister in great pain, she went to her. It might have been grudging, but she didn't hesitate to take Edith's hand as when they were girls. Ever since they were little, she had always found herself standing somewhere holding Edith's hand while she cried. There was a self-reflection that perhaps she was so cold and emotionless, because Edith had always been so sensitive, emotional, and unlucky, that she had no choice but to show the world that she wasn't like Edith at all. But now that they were older, there was something accepting about their place. They still didn't like one another, one still accused the other of trying to steal their child's affection away, but they still knew love. And in these moments, however annoyed she might have been, Mary would never leave her sister alone.

"I'm sorry, Mary." Edith sniffled.

The bombshell simply shook her head. "It's been a hard day for all of us." She brushed her sister's cheek with her gloved hand consolingly.

But the Marchioness rejected her comfort. "No, not that …" She breathed shallowly. "I'm sorry about this afternoon." There was a whimper in her voice.

A glare creased Mary's brow. "What do you mean?" She asked in confusion.

"I know … I know it was George, I … I didn't at the time, but now I know that it was George they were chasing, and I was just so scared." She shook her head. "If I wasn't so scared I could've saved him." She started to cry again. "If … I wasn't so scared." She repeated with a sob.

Some flicker of sadness and annoyance marred the beautiful woman's face. "Oh Edith …" She sighed in emotional annoyance.

There was something classic about her sister's attitude that endeared her and yet made her glare. She was grateful that Edith cared so much for her boy, but she was practically in the throes of lunacy if she thought that, she, a Marchioness, grand lady, debutante turned Magazine owner was so important that they were all counting on her to save George's life. The truth, as at least Mary saw it, was that no one knew how to fire that bloody big gun within fifty miles of Downton. Not even Papa would've been able to have saved George. In fact there was something prideful and indignant in the beautiful woman that scathed with the idea that George needed saving in the first place. In her opinion, which should be law in her thinking, George Crawley was the greatest pilot that ever lived. But somehow, because, his know-it-all Aunt Edith shot down one Nazi fighter, now she was some great marksmen that he needed to save him. Not, of course, that he had shot down so many other enemy pilots in the war, or was famous for it or anything. But no, he couldn't do anything without Edith …

On any other day she would've scolded her sister for such vain stupidity. But today of all days, there was something about the perceived sadness that stayed the prideful rebuke. She saw in her eyes that it wasn't self-importance that caused her to shed tears. It was true love and sadness for George, for a boy, a young man, she still loved so much. Edith truly believed that she could've saved Mary's boy, their boy today. Was it so different than Mary banging on the glass, trying to warn George during the battle? She'd say, on any other circumstance, that it was her right as his mother. But then she remembered that she hadn't been her child's mama in many years. When he had no one else, he had always had Edith. In a way, her sister had loved George much longer than Mary had. And for once, she'd allow this usurping. Mary was arrogant enough to believe that her love trumped everyone else's, even after a decade and a half of being dormant in herself. But she wasn't so heartless to expect that they'd all leave the love to her.

"It wasn't your fault. No one knows how to work that damned gun anyway." She comforted with a sigh. There was no tenderness in her voice, but when it came to Edith, that would be a mistake. She'd believe more in Mary's annoyance and condescending tone than a pat and kiss. Her sister would think Mary was just putting on a front if she said it any other way. Though her tone and cold voice wasn't particularly comforting, it was how they were.

Edith sniffled and then sighed. "I know you're only doing this so that you look like the strong one." She accused. Mary might have had glassy eyes but there was no way that Edith could see it in the dark.

"As it so happens, I am." She shrugged easily, her tone haughty and confident.

There was a long silence between the two rivals, before the two fell into broken little smirks. Quietly Edith pulled Mary into a hug. The two embraced awkwardly, but there was still familiarity in the way they fit together. When they slipped back to arm's length, Edith gave her older sister a peck on the cheek. She looked at her with teary eyes filled with comfort and heartache. Without hesitation, as if the ghost of adolescence was over them in their fog of this dark world, Mary took Edith's hand and led her downstairs.

It was a familiar position, a familiar sight and feeling for both of them. It seemed that they had spent so many years like this. One might never have recognized Little Miss Lady Mary if she wasn't walking down the street, leading her timid sister by the hand. Being so close in age, their Mama, Granny, and Aunt Rosamund thought it a considerable advantage to having a natural ally in their girlhood together. One might have blamed them for the girl's rivalry and future clashes on being forced together so much in their youth. Mary couldn't go anywhere and she couldn't do anything without Edith. They had begun resenting one another as they got older when Mary was forced to hold the 'Cry Baby's' hand. Meanwhile, she was endlessly mocked by Annabelle MacClare and her awful friends for being a nurse maid at their debutante teas. Now, years later, it was just natural that Mary, Edith's first and sometimes only friend in girlhood, was holding her hand again as they descended the grand staircase.

The foyer was illuminated by candle light. Long iron stands and brass candelabras held hundreds of white wax columns topped with tiny flames. It had been so long since they had seen so many of the stands and holders that once had been a daily observation. Yet, no matter how many candles lit the foyer, there was still a certain dimness and old collection of shadows that had been erased by electricity. But in these familiar dark shapes, flickering silhouettes, and hand holding, it was as if they had been transported elsewhere. It felt like they were girls again …

It felt like yesterday.

They could hear the murmur of the crowded library down the hall. It was an odd feeling that had fallen over the stately manor that was caught between two worlds. It was as if they were in purgatory. The party was somewhere in the past, but brought together tonight of something so very futuristic. In their most modern horrors they had come full circle to the very edge of an apocalypse lit by candles. There was familiar warmth that massaged the two women's bare shoulders, supple cleavage, and naked arms, that had come from the concentration of flames. They both paused to take in this paradox that twisted and warped their prospective. It was as if they were caught in a postmodern painting. Their reality was the perception of their own choosing. Did they feel young again to be in the candle lit foyer? Or did they feel so old that time and space had folded onto itself to bring them right back to the beginning?

When they moved toward the Library, there was suddenly, a flash of blinding lightning that forked out. Both women covered their eyes as it illuminated the foyer in bright blue and white light. A rip roar of noise like the firing of an artillery piece reverberated painfully and frightfully through the cavernous grandeur of the large open space. The ground shuttered and the sound of crystal tinkled as a slow precipitation of dust sprinkled like dirty snow from a London roof. In the aftermath there was a strange quiet that fell over the stately home. Mary could feel her hairs standing on end, and she felt Edith give an involuntary shutter. She might be accused of being insane, but Lady Mary had to admit that there was something very 'unnatural' about these endless storms.

"It's almost biblical isn't it?"

The voice would've made her jump if she hadn't known it as well as she had known her own. Both Edith and Mary followed it over to an end table near the drawing room. There a stalky and broad shouldered man stood, staring at the telephone. His melodic, passive, Irish brogue was thoughtful and sad. Tom Branson was dressed in his dinner jacket and bowtie. But to their surprise, in the time that Mr. Branson had finally ferried the last of the aristocrats to Downton to the time they changed for dinner, he had shaved. For the first time in a long time he was without his mustache. He looked somehow younger without it, and yet, the visibility of age was more defined on him. His face was thinner, paler, and gaunt. The nut brown locks on his head had touches of white that gave him elegance and a strange attractive quality. But without the mustache, there was still a glimmer of a chauffeur who had fallen in love with the crown jewel of the county.

He stood quietly with his hands in his pockets when Mary and Edith approached him. They wouldn't ask how he knew it was them. They had all been together for so many years, decades, and would continue to be for the foreseeable future. It was no wonder that everyone in this house was familiar with so many little idiosyncrasies that they could be blindfolded and still knew one another's footsteps from the sound they made. They were quiet and thoughtful as they reached their brother-in-law who still hadn't moved. When Mary gently touched her best friend on the shoulder, he let out a conflicted sigh, but still didn't say anything.

Edith, flanking his other shoulder, shared his view as Mary stared at Tom sympathetically. "You know, they haven't shut off the generator …" Edith offered helpfully. "The phone still works." She said timidly.

"I know …" Tom nodded slowly. "I just …" He cleared his throat. "I don't know." He shrugged with a sad sigh.

The woman to his right rubbed his shoulder. "Come Tom, no one expects us to make any business calls tonight." His partner said comfortingly.

"It's not business …" He refuted, emotion cracking his voice.

"It's Sybbie." Edith nodded, turning to Tom in anticipation. It was a knowing look, an empathy that came from also being the single parent of a young girl who volunteered for the military.

Suddenly a deep guilt fell over Mary. She slowly removed her hand and looked down. "Yes, of course." She trailed off shamefully, a tone of self-chastisement in her velvet voice.

How could she have forgotten another one of her children? It was a child whose life she had been an active part of. As hard as it was to believe, even for her, in all these years of stagnation, Lady Mary had actually helped raise a child. She was her beautiful, talented, darling girl.

She was her Sybbie.

George and Mary might have fallen out to the point of forgetting who they were to one another. But Sybbie was her Granny's girl through and through. She'd not allow Mary to get off that easy as to pawn her off on someone else. Mama and Edith might have been enough for George, but they weren't for her strong willed little girl. Sybbie had loved Mary since she had first laid eyes upon her the night Sybil died, and in their moment, they had imprinted on one another beyond reason, beyond love. From that time on Mary had been her mama. She'd feel uncomfortable under other circumstances. She never wanted darling Sybil to be a footnote, a name of no consequence on a birth certificate, like Susan had been to Rose. But it couldn't be helped when Mary had loved that little beauty oh so much. Her face was a reminder of everyone she ever loved. In the morning she was as rough and world weary as Tom, at luncheon she was as playful and full of smirk as every picture and loving story of young Mama, and in the evening she was as lovely and fresh as if Sybil had never left. Sybbie wasn't just the first grandbaby of Downton, she was its very face. All the ghosts of everything good and perfect about the castle manifested in one raven haired girl.

And she haunted her Aunt Mary, or 'Mama', depending on how much she loved and contented with her. If Mary didn't have time for her, she'd force her to make time. If Mary had business in London, so did Sybbie as her mama's impromptu personal assistant. Though, truth be told, she would more often than not lose or steal Mary's things rather than help her. The girl also had a rather bad habit of getting bored. Yet, rather than finding something to do, she would ask Anna the honor of waking Mary. Then, in the most ungodly hour of the morning, rather than be gently awoken by a kind voiced Lady's Maid; her door was kicked open. Then, with a wild, heathen cry, a streak with long raven curls and silky night slip would storm in and pounce on the pampered sleeping woman. Anna would try not to laugh as she brought in the breakfast tray while the girl pressed the sudden ambush. When it was over, pinned to her pillow, Mary negotiated her toast, jam, and newspaper in order to cease hostilities. She never failed to glare when papa would come in to see what the racket was about and find Mary and Sybbie under twisted silk sheets together. The girl, acting as if they were caught in the passion of a forbidden tryst, would kiss Mary's hand and exclaim "I'm sorry you had to find out this way, M'Lord, But I love her, sir!" Papa looked to be in physical pain when trying not to smile, as he wordlessly walked away with a shake of his head. When he was gone, Sybbie would grab Mary's toast obnoxiously and say "I think he took that rather well, don't you, darling?" And then, with the bread hanging from her teeth, she'd throw open the newspaper and begin to read.

With an assault of such loving memories, it wasn't that Mary had forgotten Sybbie, but rather never considered her in any immediate danger. She was a mechanic, she worked on George's fighter, rebuilt it by hand if Atticus was to be believed. There was much she didn't know about her son, but what she did know from the time he was a baby, was that he'd do anything to keep Sybbie safe. So as long as George was there he'd let nothing hurt her.

Sarah Bunting had once described Sybbie's relationship with George as the very definition of toxic. She had been fully convinced, while she was engaged to Tom Branson, that her future step-daughter had great potential, but was constantly led astray by George Crawley. There was no one who'd contest that Ms. Bunting looked only to further Sybbie's education, to make an advocate and activist of her in the shape of her dearly departed mama that she'd heard so much about. But in the spring of 1936 George Crawley had spent a considerable time in his adventures in America fighting violent Socialist revolutionaries in New Orleans and recently in Mexico. And to come home to find one trying to squirm into his family would not be tolerated. It was doubled by the fact that Sarah Bunting was doing everything she could to separate Sybbie from the wild and undisciplined young man who spent too long in America. He was a youth who had returned home from the frontiers with dangerous ideas that were the polar opposite of what she, and supposedly his Uncle Tom, believed. She didn't want her blooming young flower to be poisoned by an outlaw who believed in an independent State of Israel, racial integration, and that Communism and Nazism were the same evil with different names.

But in the end, George's return was the death-null to the last chance Sarah Bunting had with the man she loved. She had been convinced that she could wrestle the old Tom Branson away from the prison that the Crawley's had put him in. There was a belief that she could deal with Lady Mary. Tom's business partner was a vain and vapid woman who wouldn't care who Tom was in the first place, as long as it didn't affect her. And while she thought Lady Sybil was a silly girl with, all be it, the right ideas, Ms. Bunting thought that she could do better with her daughter. There was no Tom Branson without his very pretty little girl. She saw a true bridge between the Aristocracy and the common people in the young girl. She was, after all, George Crawley's heiress if anything where to happen. She whiffed such plots and real change if somehow the Crawley's crowned princess were to end up the Countess of Grantham and her daughter. But when that girl refused to give up George at any cost she learned a hard lesson, but a clear one.

There was no getting between Sybbie Branson and George Crawley.

It was long talked about since the day George was born, but no one had really conceived of how close the two were. Even before the Nanny West incident, she found the newborn hard to handle when she separated him from Sybbie. The boy was loud, boisterous, and screeched with such unseen rage when the woman tried to mistreat the girl. His squeals of anger could be heard echoing through the Downton corridors when little Miss Sybbie began to cry silent tears in the mean spirited treatment of her. It defeated a frustrated Nanny West. She would've liked nothing better than to lock the little half-breed up and never see her again. But baby George could hardly visit his Mama without the girl being with him. In the infant's empathy felt in the sorrow of the little girl being abused, it imprinted a sense of hawkish protectiveness in George for the girl. And as a result it bore an ingrained primal instinct of reliance and non-existent personal boundaries between the two that supernaturally connected them for the rest of their lives.

It was often joked that the two people who would marry George and Sybbie would have to be strong enough to forever be their third wheel.

In many ways, the two completed one another. Despite being born from different parents, nine months apart. The two acted, looked, and thought like twins. While George, more than once over his life, had spoken darkly "I already have a father …" in gravely reproach to anyone hoping to take the empty place in his life. The two boasted, in spirit, that they basically shared parents anyway. George was missing a father and Sybbie was missing a mother, their remaining parents where closer than the closest of friends, so some things were just meant to be. They were polar opposites attached at the hip. And often times their clashes were the entertainment on a slow or quiet day.

George Crawley, from a very young age, was a world class brooder. The boy was often haunted by tragedies of his past and the ghosts of self-expectations he had in measuring up to a father he never knew. He had always been a serious young man, robbed of a childhood, who experienced great heart ache, disappointment, and deep guilt too soon in life. He could be found sitting in the dark in his father's chair, being tormented by faces and actions of a past right on his heels …

That was if Sybbie had ever allowed him too.

The Honorable, and now Lady, Sybil Branson couldn't abhor serious people more. As a whole she considered the human race to be inherently silly creatures, and thus, to be serious, was betraying the very paradox that made their species so terribly interesting. At all times they knew where Sybbie was in the large manor, fore somewhere was laughter, thumping, and an ancient Celtic or Irish song that ever languidly accompanied her task or wandering mind. There were times that the Crawley's would take guests, or just themselves, on a walk through the Gardens. But then they'd stop in a hush. As somewhere in the hedges came the echo of the loveliest voice that Tom Branson's mother could ever gift to her granddaughter. Her beautiful and enticing voice fell softly, perfectly, through the scenic beauty of an English country spring in full bloom. Robert would turn to their guests with the proudest of smiles, love enchanted in his eyes, and claim that it seemed an angel was somewhere in their garden.

Sybbie and George had spent most of their informative years apart, only seeing one another once or twice a year before he disappeared for two years after New Orleans. But when George returned, and after the Sinclair incident, they reset so fast it was as if nothing had changed. They had picked up exactly where they left off as young children.

There would be times in which George could be found sitting alone, glancing out a window. His eyes cast in the darkest of shade in the sorrow of a tragic memory. When suddenly, Sybbie would rush up and vault onto his lap. Then, with a smile, she would eat her sandwich right in his face till he acknowledged her. Annoyed, he would tell her that if she didn't quit eating all the time, she'd get fat. The prettiest of teenage queens, with a satin bow in her hair, would smile. Snuggling up with him, she'd open her book. Languidly, she'd sing-songly warn him that if she did get fat, it wouldn't get any easier for him when she had to keep George from feeling sorry for himself. With a sigh at the threat, he allowed Sybbie to feed him a bite of her food and the two would read her book together. There were many other times that members of the family on walks found the two under a tree. Sybbie would be lying belly down on a blanket, eating an apple, softly singing to herself in Gaelic, and reading engine manuals. While George had his worn outback fedora slouched, the brim pulled over his eyes, napping with his head pillowed against Sybbie's bum.

Those, of course, were on the tamer days.

In the prelude to war, when a teenage Marigold and Rachel spent their time lounging together in Rose's room, listening to records, talking to all hours of the night, and reading fashion magazines, every member of the Crawley family and staff thought they were angels sent from heaven above. Because, Lady Grantham and Tom thought that George and Sybbie as teenagers would be the death of them. There were bar fights, drag racing, Boxing tournaments (George the fighter and Sybbie the corner woman), and attendance at some of the seediest and dangerous back alley pubs in London. There was even a near disastrous international incident in a clash with several members of the German diplomatic attaché. It was only Shrimpie's deft diplomatic skill and the Nazi government's unwillingness to devolve why _a blind Turk_ was so important to them.

There were many times that Cora Crawley lay awake at night wondering how the two teens, after all the things they did, did not end up in jail. Till her dying day, Lady Grantham addressed law enforcement officers with an ingrained "Whatever it is, George and Sybbie didn't do it." without even looking up from her needlepoint. Always in her mind was an incident that was as confusing as it was somehow a staple that would forever be an image indelible to explain who her two eldest grandchildren were.

On a bright summer day, Lady Grantham and Mrs. Baxter were walking through the dilapidated village. It had been such a lovely day that there was a talk of a picnic for luncheon when the peace was so suddenly disturbed by the sound of an explosion in the distance. When Cora and Mrs. Baxter saw a skinny sauntering cloud of smoke rising above an abandoned warehouse, they both exchanged a look. But there confusion was only intensified when suddenly, skidding and sliding around the corner was George and Sybbie. Over the girl's shoulder was a potato sack filled with film canisters, while being hauled under George's arm was little Hugh Aldridge, Cora's youngest grandchild at just four years old. The small boy was covered head to toe in ice cream. His face was alight, akin to a pig who had found a cool mud hole on a hot day. There was a smile of pure endearing amusement on Mrs. Baxter's face while Cora palmed her face, muttering the Lord's Prayer.

The two came sprinting up to their Granny breathlessly. She looked rather embarrassed at being accosted by the outrageous mismatch of figures, especially when every passerby was staring at them in the middle of the street. George and Sybbie looked afire with panic as they both, in unison, repeated that "they" were after them. Who "they" were, wasn't clear, only that "they" were after her grandchildren. Hearing someone cursing in alarm upon seeing the twosome, both George and Sybbie let out little panicked shrieks and made a run for Downton Abbey. As they fled, George ordered Baxter to clock their lead pursuers to give them time, while Sybbie just shouted for Cora to save herself. Meanwhile, little Hugh, contently sucking his fingers, exclaimed from under George's arm that it was, in fact, the greatest day of his life. But before Cora could ask her Lady's Maid what was going on, a mob dressed in Ice Cream sales uniforms and hats, carrying mops and brooms, and covered in their product, went chasing after her grandchildren in a riotous fury.

After their ruckus in Downton and their subsequent Colonial Adventures in Palestine and Egypt, there was a belief, hope, that war would temper their antics. But from the moment that Leftenant Branson arrived at the badly hit Derby Airdrome, they once again picked up where they left off. Nothing was more apparent than the packet of pictures that Atticus sent to their parents.

It showed Sybbie wrapped in a black silk cape, her face made up like a beautiful, cursed, gothic heroine. Slowly in the sequence she was stalking George who was lying under the covers on his cot in a black t-shirt, his leg drawn up and his forearm covering his eyes. He seemed to be asleep. Slipping to her knees on the plush mattress, Sybbie threw open her silk cape theatrically to reveal a form fitting black satin nightgown. Snarling with fake vampire fangs, the sleek seductress slowly bent down to frighten a sleeping George. But the next picture never failed to make their parents smile. It seemed that the girl had underestimated her prey, as the final picture had the cursed princess pinned on her back, under the covers. George had waited till the last minute before he flipped and rolled the girl underneath him. Sybbie looked defeated and tight cheeked in annoyance to the camera, while George lay on top of her, head pillowed on her breast as he fell back asleep. If anything it was a heart-felt assurance that after all the chaos and death …

They were still kids in courageous hearts that were untouched by this awful war.

Quickly, it became apparent that Sybbie's inexhaustible charm enticed throughout the shot up airfields in the Sector One defense perimeter. Unlike everyone else, whose fighters were maintained by a changing roster of mechanics, depending on the assignment of which airbase you were that week. George, the heir of the Lord Leftenant, got privileges that he didn't ask for in a personal staff member who was not only a woman, but a woman who looked like Sybbie Branson. At first, there were grumblings at the famous Lady Mechanic of the Colonial Circuit forcing her way into the action. But soon there wasn't a pilot, mechanic, or field crewman that hadn't fallen in love with the ace pilot's personal mechanic. She was one part pin-up, one part Grand Lady, and all admirable in every way. She was elegant and delicate in look, but a true genius at the work. The girl was a fighting man and Grease Monkey's dream. Though not a young man would dare accost her, afraid of the way she could swing a 'monkey wrench' in temper, and of the legendary fighter George Crawley, whose stories of adventures through many dangers both real and rumored were famous as they were cautionary.

The many starry eyed lads who watched the famous heiress wistfully, gave the longing nickname of "The Star of the County Grantham" to their worshiped fancy. In the years of the first war, Lady Nurse Sybil Crawley took her breaks at the garage of Downton Abbey. There she ate lunch, read the paper and watched Tom Branson work. The Chauffeur, knowing that his lady love was watching, sang the Irish song "The Star of the County Down" as he worked. It was the song that reminded him of Sybil and the promise of his love in the long hours without her by his side. Even when she pretended that she wasn't paying attention when he started to sing their song, a smile would touch her lips behind an open newspaper. Years later, their daughter's nickname came from her absently singing her parent's special song as she also worked on a Crawley's engine.

In the endless hours of killing and death that surrounded George Crawley, he found Sybbie to be his only anchor to the light. When in the past twelve years he had seen how easy the dark path was becoming to travel. She was filled with boundless optimism, humorous observations, and carried a treasure trove of loving memories to keep him from being consumed by darkness. But it was in the early morning when she was invaluable. George flew and was endlessly engaged by Nazi pilots by day. And by moonlight Sybbie worked to make sure he could still fly by sun rise. But it was in the few hours between war and engineering that the two overlapped. Then, it was like when they were little. Sybbie had her own cot, but it was never used. Every night, she'd strip out of her work clothing and slip in with George. Snuggling, she'd lie on her side and faced the sleeping loved one. Her hand impossibly softened by Hydraulic fluids and oil, cupped her pilot's cheek. The young man, half-awake, or even fully asleep, would kiss her palm cherishingly and press it hard to him. Adrift in a sea of blood and fire, he was desperate for some sort of human contact. Eventually the girl turned over and snuggled back into his warmth. The two would curl up together, his nose nuzzled into the side of her pale neck. Comfortable and yet afraid of the dawn, they dreamt for just a precious hour or two of better days together before it would start all over again.

But tonight when Sybbie Branson would retire, she'd not find anyone there. She'd sit in the dark officer's quarters to find no one, not a person, had come back. There was not a word, an expression that could aptly portray the deep loneness and sorrow the once carefree girl felt. Surrounded by dead men's things, she'd strip out of her work clothing and quietly slip into George's cot. Clinging to his pillow, she'd spoon it as she'd take a good look around while tears welled in her eyes. This time last night, there was a relief, a thought that they were safely in the rear of the action. Last night it was a room filled with laughing and joking. It was a place where her Uncle Atticus slept with his picture of his wife in his hand, a place where George had held her, stroking her belly to help her sleep. Now in the darkness she found herself all alone as the first roars of thunder echoed in the distance. As the rain fell from the night sky, a crying girl sang "Casadh An Tsugain" to empty barracks as she clutched her best friend's pillow.

For the first time since she could remember, all Sybbie Branson wanted to do was go home.

"I keep imagining her out there in the rain …"

Tom Branson said quietly. "And she's all alone." His voice shook. "And she's waiting … waiting for someone who never came back." He sputtered. "I, I promised her mother, after Sinclair, I promised Sybil that I would never let our daughter be alone in the rain, waiting for someone who wasn't …" He breathed harshly. Edith gently rubbed his arm, while Mary absently took his hand with both of hers.

"I'm sorry, Mary." Tears in his eyes, the man immediately apologized for the insinuation that her boy, their boy, wasn't …

"It's alright, his plane is broken, and George wouldn't be going back to Brancaster tonight, either way." His partner nodded understandingly, her palm stroking his knuckles soothingly.

Tom parroted the nod. "I know, and she loves him so much …" He sighed with a voice that nearly broke. "And if I call her, I would … I would have to tell her." He shook his head. "And I, I can't go get her, and I can't leave her overnight with uncertainty of George like that." It was tearing Tom Branson apart as a man, and as a father. "She's out there alone, scared, and confused, hoping and praying. But I can't do it. I can't break her heart over the phone, not when I don't know what to tell her!" He shuddered as tears fell from his smooth cheeks. "I just want her to be here, to be safe. I just want her to come home, both of them …" He looked to Mary. "All of them." He then turned to Edith and took her hand.

There was a long pause as all of three of their lines were cast into a time passage to simpler days. Three beds filled with three small children. George and Marigold with matching teddy bears, and Sybbie with "Miss Felicity" the bunny that Isobel had given her. They were safe then, they were safe and happy, protected from the cruelty of the world. In the morning, when they'd come to check on them, Sybbie would be curled up as the big spoon with George. While the boy and Marigold were holding hands in the space between their beds as they slept. Mary and Edith would turn to one another, and despite their bitterness, they'd share a smile. Now it seemed like a heavenly vision amongst the damned that wandered this purgatory. Marigold was cut off in York. Sybbie was all alone in an empty airdrome. And George was … George was …

Mary took ahold of Edith's hand making a circle of three as they stood outside the empty drawing room. Each parent was lost, emotional, and worried. They had all felt like failures, despite knowing that all of their children were now grown, and on their own. The feeling that they had to protect their children was strong, even when it was no longer their job too anymore. Tom and Edith had done such a marvelous job with their two girls. Mary didn't feel like she belonged with her brother and sister in this moment. But she stayed anyway, because, they needed her prayers just as much. She couldn't keep running when she didn't feel worthy of something. She had for fourteen years and all it got her was this very feeling standing in the ruins of a kingdom that she had stolen. Her boy was out there, lost to knowledge, after sacrificing to save all of them. All of that with no inkling, no idea …

He had no idea how much he had been loved.

"It's settled then …" Mary said, her voice shaken with hard emotions.

"What is?" Edith asked in tears. Tom sniffled.

Mary looked from one sibling to another. "Tomorrow morning, we go and get her." She said to Tom.

"Get Sybbie?" Edith asked with a frown.

Mary sniffed and nodded. "Yes, and we get Marigold too. We get both of them and we bring them home." There was no compromise in her voice. This was going to happen.

"But, Sybbie is an officer." Tom replied.

"Yes, an Engineering Officer who doesn't have a plane to work on, and is only there as a favor to the Lord Leftenant, who, I assume, can just as easily recall her."

"And Marigold will be in London by tomorrow." Edith said.

"Mrs. Hughes will call her in the morning."

"But, she had a performance for the royal princesses."

"I don't give a fig about Margret or … whatever the other one's name is. They can't run that ballet without Marigold. No one is paying to see that hairy Russian anyway."

"His name is Ivor …"

"I'm not talking about the male dancers."

"That was unkind …"

"Oh, hush, Edith!"

The two sisters glared at one another before they got back on track. Sighing, Mary shook both Tom and Edith's hands. "The point is that we're gonna bring them home, even for just a little bit. Bring them somewhere safe, the safest place in the world, right here … George saw to that." Mary suddenly got very quiet. She felt Tom give her hand a squeeze.

"He's out there, Mary. I can feel it." He smiled roughly. "You know him … he does things in his own time." He chuckled through a sniffle.

Edith rubbed Mary's knuckles gently with her thumb. "I've known George a long time ..." She started.

"Some might say his entire life."

"Honestly, Mary, do you want to hear this or not?"

"No, not particularly."

"Well …" Edith was caught off guard by the comment. She would quarrel with her if she didn't know that being her punching bag was how her sister coped with grief. "Well, you're going too whether you, jolly well, like it or not!" She announced indignantly.

"What I was going to say, before I was rudely interrupted …"

"Edith, come on." Tom gave her an eye of a referee.

"Is that I've known George _his entire life_ …" She shot her sister a dirty look. "And I know for a fact that he's been through a whole … a whole lot worse than this before and survived to come home." Edith drifted off, regretful of sudden memories.

"He saved me in Mexico." Tom nodded in agreement. "There must have been at least thirty blood thirsty mercenaries in that brothel in Dejalo. But he still found a way to get us out, found a way to get us back home safe and sound." He squeezed Mary's hand.

"He's out there …" Edith said with no compromise.

There was a long silence before Mary spoke. "But does he know?" She asked herself aloud. "Has he ever known?" She whispered.

"He will, they all will, in the morning." Tom nodded. "By this time tomorrow, they'll all be in this house, back upstairs, you'll see." He said.

"Sybbie will be snuggled up with George." Edith added. "And Marigold will still be holding his hand …" For some reason Edith trailed off after she said that. A flash of sudden … such sudden suspicions and half-truths of some large secret began to dart behind her eyes.

"We'll all be together soon." Mary nodded in agreement. She had too. It was the only belief that could last her through the night.

From the corner someone politely cleared their throat. The circle of family holding hands in silent prayer turned to the new presence. Watching them was Lady Cora Crawley, who was shadowed in candle light. The lovely vision of the Countess stepped forward in white and gold.

There was something of a godsend, a true comfort that only a child could feel in a moment of sadness when a parent arrived. She gently touched Tom on the shoulder affectionately, smiling at him. Then, with a look of love, she wiped away Edith's tear with her finger gently. Cupping one daughter's cheek, then reached over and took ahold of the other's chin, and rubbed it with her thumb. Of course she knew what was going on, knew what was in all of their fears and sorrow.

She was their mother.

"Dry up, dinner is served." She said quietly.

Before they left, Lady Grantham stroked Mary's neck with sympathy, and kissed Edith on the cheek. She waited till the children departed together for the dining room. Then with a flustered noise, she looked away with glassy eyes. Quietly, she gave a shuddered sigh and paced to the library door where the voices were getting louder and concentrated.

She put a hand on the door knob, but didn't turn it.

Her bottom lip trembled, and she slumped against the door with a sputtered sob. The glimmer of a single tear on her pale cheek reflected off the candle light like a stained glass portrait in amber. She covered her eyes with a gloved hand. Cora was shuttering, but controlling the dread, sadness, and terror of it happening all over again. The unborn babe, Sybil, Matthew, Little Cora, Rosamund, and now …

"George … my baby." She whispered with a small sob.

She knew. She had known maybe longer than anyone else. Cora didn't grudge them for trying to keep it from her, because, it was done out of pure love and worry. But she knew in the way Tom said Mary's name at the crash site, the way they looked when they got back on the truck. It was the way Robert held her when he got back home. It was the way George sounded on the radio when they spoke for the final time on the train. Cora had raised that boy, she knew the resignation in his voice, knew that he didn't think he would make it back home alive.

Licking her lips, the handsome woman turned to the great open space of the empty foyer of the manor. She knew every piece of furniture, ever painting, engraving, vase, and rug. She remembered it as when her girls were little, when she was young, leaving their London home after Robert's father's death to take over. In the long years she did all she could to build a home for her family out of the cold manor. Now, she saw the encroaching mold, the cobwebs, dust, and the snaking ivy wrapping old stone. She never looked quite her age, graceful and attractive till the very end. But tonight she had felt old. She had lived too long, lived to bury her children, her grandchildren.

And yet her life went on.

There was nothing but torment in the fall of a great emptiness where nothing existed but the love of her family and the endless duty of a title she had so fervently chased as a teenage girl. Duty to a cornet, a title, and a ruined tomb filled with the finest of meaningless trinkets. Wiping her eye, she stood straight, and remembered who she was taught to be, not who she was.

When she opened the door, the lovely Countess of Grantham smiled big and emptily.

"That's dinner everyone!"

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _A Timeless Lullaby" – Brock Hewitt_

" _The Star of the County Down" – Sheoda & Margaret Brenan (Celtic Woman)_

" _Casadh an Tsugain/ Frankie's Song" – Brooklyn (OST)_


	20. The Masque of the Red Death - Part III

**The Masque of the Red Death: Part III**

" _There's frost on the graves and the monuments  
But the taverns are warm in town  
People curse the government  
And shovel hot food down  
The lights are out in city hall  
The castle and the keep  
The moon shines down upon it all  
The legless and asleep" _

" _And it's cold on a tollgate  
With the wagons creeping through  
Cold on a tollgate  
God knows what I could do with you  
And It's what it is  
It's what it is now"_

 _ **-"What it is" By Mark Knopfler**_

* * *

It was the soft glow of the light, the shadowy fringes at the edges of the wooden pallet, and the feeling of spectators dissecting your every move in critique. There was butterflies in one's stomach, an educate to the play-acting, and, of course, there was a script. For those who were a regular player in the drama and storytelling that happened here, you'd hardly forget all the little nuances in a lavish or brutish performance. It was a place where one wanted to hog the spotlight, while also quietly observe the scene in front of them. Though this was not Shakespeare, make no mistake, this was a great stage, some in this high class world might even say the greatest …

It was the dinner table of the British Peerage.

Here lives, fortunes, marriages, and small kingdoms rose, fell, or expanded based on what happened between and during courses. There was rarely a frown in the party, everyone found you funny, and yet you'd be hard press to find one person who actually liked you. This was the way of the old world, the way of things in _their_ world. Forget North Africa and the skies over Derbyshire, this was their battlefield in which everything was always at stake. Peerage, cornets, titles, high society, all of it had always hinged on the conversation, on the meal, and on the wines selected. A regular man, a common man, did his trade in the sweat of sunlight, digging, chopping, and scribbling his sums. But an aristocrat, a titled man, his trade was charm, class, elegance, and ease of manner all under candle light. His uniform was a tux, his coworker was a wife with a lovely, but tasteful, gown. And his stock and trade was his progeny. He was a showman, an entertainer, and king all in the same breath of a societal businessman who sold dignity and the hollowed names of long dead men and women on a family tree to other traders who had come to his table.

For his wife and daughters, he used them as a mechanic or carpenter used his tools from a box. A wife to unscrew a tightly wound matriarch, a middle daughter to mend a young man leaking in drunkenness, and an eldest girl to screw in an eligible young man, rich, titled, with a fine family name into the family tree at her side. They were all pieces to be moved and used in order to keep up one's trade. And they all rarely questioned it, for they didn't know another way. And they were pretty sure that they'd like least the alternative of how everyone else does it in the world. They kept seeing the world changing, the loss of the estate, their grand country palaces. But as for the way their world worked, it was more or less the same. Maybe it was too much the same for some. But for others, those who had come here tonight, this was the height of comfort.

As the countryside rumbled and shook in violent summer storm, as people died in the thousands on city streets of the Kingdom, they all sat around a table and played out the same dinner theater they had for many long years. There was uncertainty of tomorrow, of if there was even a country, a kingdom, left out there. But for now this was what they knew. Death was all around them and yet they still dressed in lavished opulent gowns and crisp tux. Their tiaras still had crystals in them and their waist coat buttons were still made of pearl. There was a war outside of this rotting castle, outside the golden lit dining room. After all they saw today, all the dead pilots and their smashed flying machines lying alone in the fields and lush hillsides, death could find them just as easily. No one knew what could happen when they woke up tomorrow, what could happen while they ate tonight. But they did know this for certain …

If they were going to go down, they'd do so as nobility and dressed in their finest.

But even shut within the confines of the dining room, lost in their own worlds of the past, they could not escape the war. It could've been easier to think of this as a holiday if they hadn't been witness to the chaos of battle, hear the final words of dying men while parentless children screamed in the cars behind them. They walked a mile in the woods and came to a farm that was littered with bodies and burning machines all around. They were driven to this grand house with the sight of death and destruction in the distance, the awkward, twisting silhouettes of dead pilots hanging from trees by their parachutes in the back-lighting of twilight. And when they thought they had finally escaped the war, they had only come upon their host's home that had so suddenly been hit hard. These were things that usually wouldn't bother people like them. They, after all, married for money, prestige, and societal advancement. But it was the curse of the Crawley's that so many of them, if not all of them, had married for love. And with great love came great loss. That was why the Dowager Countess of Sinderby had been upstairs crying into her teenage daughter's chest, rather than planning on how to spend her husband's money. And with Lady Sinderby being the youngest daughter of the house, it made it a rather awkward dinner.

The conversations were hushed and carried no meaning or weight. It was a cautious and mindless tedium of small talk of the last time they had been in such a violent storm or the schedule for the activities tomorrow. But there was no talk, ever tip-toeing, over the trauma they all witnessed. Just the sheer idea that they'd address the events of the day and the emotions of the experience was almost traitorous to an Englishman's very nature. The topic of war, killing, and death were not suitable topics at a dinner table, or at least at these types of dinner tables. They made room for more delicate sensibilities and tact in the face of possibly treading on a topic that might have carried some secret melancholy.

But while they wouldn't talk of war at the table, the topic of its causes and the future was on the tongues of all. It had been nearly four hundred years since there had been any attempted invasion of the English Isle. And since then it seemed wholly impossible that the British Empire would ever be threatened by outside forces. In the first Great War, England and her allies were ever on the attack. They took Ottoman territory, fought German's over disputed lands in Africa, and defended the French countryside. But now, now everywhere from North Africa, to the very English mainland, all of the Kingdom was under withering assault by Nazi aggression. It was a true picture of how far they had fallen, how declined they had become. And there were some, many in the aristocracy, who blamed this on the dastardly decision to go to war against the Nazi in the first place.

There were those who had not forgotten the tenants in which the Third Reich was founded on. Many of these men had stayed up long in the night, lamenting with their Cambridge and Oxford cousins of the purity, divinity of their place in society. They spoke in their clubs of the deep beauty and refinement of their women, and the high manor and gentlemanly class of their men. If these 'gifts" were not so given by God himself, then it must have been found within their genetic code. This "Eugenics" was all the rage in the years before the war. Over a cigar, a brandy, a port, Robert Crawley stayed silent at the self-congratulations of these genetic studies. He dare not speak out, as he dare not ever support such thinking. It was quite simply impossible, for his wife was half Jewish, and she was certainly the most beautiful woman with the most generous of spirit, he had ever known. Certainly they could argue that his inability to make son's, was, on some level, the fault of bad breeding. But, because, Robert loved his wife, loved his children, he did not believe in the Eugenics nonsense. But that didn't stop it from finding its way into his household.

Mary, for a long time, did not find a fault in the thinking. Sometimes Robert cursed his dimwittedness in ever allowing Mama and her choices of governess teach his girl. At the time and for many years dealing with Sybil's rebelliousness, he thought that it was a godsend that at least one of his daughters was so classically brought up, the definition of high class Ladylike finery. But after Sybil died, in the years to reflect on how Cora brought their girl up without Governess, tutored her in the ways of things herself, he saw himself a fool. Sybil had the pulse of things, while Mary, oh, how his Mary lived in their world. It made Lord Grantham uncomfortable in the years before her friendship with Tom, how much Mary believed in the Eugenic non-sense. And he was sure, even after Tom, even when Matthew strove to break her thinking in terms of superiority of race and breeding, there was still a part of Mary that still believed in it.

He wasn't sure how much Edith had believed in it from the beginning. She told him herself that she might have, if the principles of the thing weren't so terribly unkind. And after Michael Gregson, his middle girl would grow to hate anything a Brown Shirt said, or anyone who'd agree with them. But for Mary, her rationale was impractical, if not wholly built on grave arrogance. She did not believe the Jewish people were dirty, she did not believe that the weaker people needed to be cleansed. But she did believe herself superior, and made up for by her surroundings in that all the lesser people she loved were made better by her love. He suspected his daughter didn't very much feel sympathy for the Eugenic logic these days, ever defending her family from anyone claiming they were impure, but she did support the idea in order not to go against what was fashionable in society.

Robert wished he could fault her, but he had no one to blame but himself, for he did the same rather than attempt to crush these ideas in their infancy in his clubs and his own home.

"I believe it was foolish to go to war with Germany in the first place." The Lord of Acorn Hall spoke up with a shake of his head. "It's that damn fool Churchill, and those damn fool young men who read too many pulps, watch too many serials, and worship at his heels." He announced.

"I whole heartedly agree." Lord Springborough replied. He was a small, nervous, man about the Crawley Girls age. He had owned stocks in various companies that, ironically, all would be needed in times of war. Robert rolled his eyes and looked down to his wife. Cora immediately locked eyes with her husband and shared a private knowing glance with a smile. She ever was the expert in turning Robert Crawley's indignation into a private joke between them.

"I believe after Dunkirk, we should've made peace with Old Adolf." He shook his head in tragedy.

Tom Branson stirred from his spot next to Mary. "A man who believes that the Jewish people are at fault for all the ills of the world?" Tom questioned. "I don't think a man such as that gives hope of reason." The Irishman protested politely.

The small blonde nodded with a mouthful of lobster. "Hmm …" he swallowed. "He is, a bit 'excessive' I grant you." He relented. "But we're fools not to ally ourselves with him when it comes time to fight the Soviet Empire." There was a rueful shake of his head.

"Aren't the Russian's ally to the Nazis?" Mary frowned.

"Oh, I don't see that lasting very long." Robert added.

"I concur." Shrimpie Flintshire nodded. "The world isn't big enough for Hitler and Stalin." He grunted as he cut his meat.

"And when the time comes the Empire should be on the right side." Annabelle McCordle added off her father's point.

"But what is "the right side", exactly?" The Duchess asked.

"Surely not Germany." Edith protested in horror of the thought.

Annabelle swished her wine around and smirked sharply. "Come, Cousin Edith, I don't recall if you even know what the right side is, much less ever been on it." She chuckled to play off the cruelty in her voice. She was helped by several choice lords giving lustful eyes toward her.

"Have a care, Annabelle." Shrimpie warned sternly, wiping his mouth, his face unamused at the crestfallen look on the Marchioness's face next to him.

"Oh, Papa, you know Cousin Edith and I … how we jest. Surely, even as a Marchioness, she hasn't lost her sense of humor." She smirked but with dark eyes behind her shark's amusement.

It hadn't been very different as when they were little girls. During their visits to Duneagle, Annabelle MacClare would always lure Edith away with some super-secret gossip. Hoping that it would be some great knowledge that Mary wouldn't know, Edith followed her to the attics. But at tea time, the girl came down with bruises on her thighs and looked as if she had been crying. However when asked where she got them, all it took was one look from Annabelle, and Edith would only say that they 'played' too rough.

It was predicable now, as when they were girls, when Mary smirked across the table. "I couldn't say I agree with you, Cousin." She gave a charmingly cold shrug. "Surely if Edith had a sense of humor she'd have much more to say about such a fine frock you're wearing." She shook her head before giving a pleasant tilt.

Cora looked across to her daughter and widened her eyes in a wordless warning to not restart the girlhood rivalry that nearly tore Lady Violet's family apart. But Mary seemed pleased with herself, feeling Tom smiling into his napkin next to her.

The pretty woman gave such a stiff smile that her teeth nearly shattered behind pillowed crimson lips. "How lovingly quaint, Cousin Mary …" She complemented her stiffly. "I - I don't know anyone who refers to gowns as "Frocks" anymore. Surely no one makes frocks …" She giggled to cover a vicious temper as she took a draft of her wine.

Mary looked like a predator that already had blood on her fangs. "Oh, of course not." She smirked. "Though, I do wonder if your dress woman knew that as well, the poor lamb." She made a little noise of self-quandary. It was a self-fulfilling promise every time for Lady Annabelle. She had always come in with the higher rank in society, and it gave her confidence, but too much. She often forgot that Lady Mary was an assassin, a true, unstoppable, killer in the ring of turn-a-phrase. There was never a moment in which Annabelle MacClare could outmatch Mary Crawley in wit.

There was a hard silence that fell over the table. While several throats cleared awkwardly and eyebrows rose, Mary toasted Annabelle and continued on her dinner, ignoring the daggers her mother was tossing. While Lady Gosford seemed quietly incensed, Edith looked up to find Anna Bates standing at attention by the wall next to her boy. The Lady's Maid, who came down to help serve with her son, gave a comforting wink to her former charge. It was a cruel kindness of Lady Mary. Surely she'd always find something mean to say to Lady Edith, but she'd not allow anyone else the same pleasure.

Allowing the ladies their scuffle, the old colonel, Simon Wessel, wiggled his imposing, bushy, white mustache. "The point remains that this is a war we cannot win alone." He pounded the table lightly for point's sake.

"Surely, it's not too late to offer terms now?" The Duchess replied.

Tom shook his head. "With all due respect, I don't believe any terms the Germans will have will be terms satisfactory. Not after the RAF bombed Berlin." He offered.

"Quite right …" Robert agreed.

"It's that damned fool, Churchill." The Lord of Acorn Hall replied angrily, belaboring his point. "He's been looking for a fight since Hitler came to power!" He sighed.

"The French have capitulated, and the Germans have even allowed them to form a new government." Lord Cinderhill, who had been eyeing Lady Gosford's ample display of almost immodest cleavage all night, finally joined. There was something explicit in the way the woman looked at the man next to her. Surely they'd find one another tonight as Downton slept.

"Yes, perhaps we can find ourselves a new Prime Minister." She added with a husky voice.

"Yes, presided over by Hitler's High Council, with garrisons of German troops in every county." Tom argued.

"Surely, the Germans will hear terms, preserve our way of life. They'll respect at least that much." Cinderhill shrugged. "That is more than I can say for the Reds." There was something accusatory in the way he looked at Tom Branson. They had all heard the rumors of the man's socialist sympathies of the past. Though, as a business owner, and estate agent, his nobility of the idea seemed to fade along with his reading of the atrocities like-minded politicos had committed in the last fifteen years. Yet, still, the specter of his youthful politics haunted him at every dinner table and drawing room.

"Aye … and what about everyone else's way of life?" Tom glared. But when lustful Lord and snobbish lady both looked at Tom as if he were an insect, he knew the answer. After all, they only cared about preserving this, the aristocracy. Everyone else was expendable.

"I'd say that is sedition!" the Colonel replied in offense to Cinderhill and Lady Annabelle's comments. "Britain will never be ruled by a foreign power. Damn it, sir!" He announced.

Cora lifted a gloved hand. "I don't think anyone could disagree with you on that score, Colonel." She smiled at her husband's old commanding officer during the Bore Wars. "We're all simply trying to find a reasonable path." She was gentle, settling, and her voice was made of a warm broth.

"Mm … yes, well." The Colonel reeled back and nodded to the Countess, grumbling.

"The only side to be on is our own! We must fight on till the last, for our way of life, for freedom!"

Guests turned when the youthful voice filled with courage and righteousness didn't originate from the table. John Bates Jr., the footman, looked passionate. His mother's gloved hands gave his arm a quiet rebuke in a tug of discipline. Mr. Carson, standing behind the head of the table, hands behind his back, looked dismayed. There was an awkward silence that fell over the dining room at the vocal intrusion of a servant into their conversation. Lady Grantham and Lady Mary turned to Carson whose mouth trembled in surprise and embarrassment.

"Beg his pardon, M'Lord, M'Lady." Anna curtsied to Shrimpie and Lady Edith as the highest ranking members of society at the table. "He's …" She paused as she held her teenage son's arm in a vice grip. "Eager" She finished apologetically.

"Eager …" Shrimpie nodded. "And quite right, wouldn't you say?" He turned to Edith next to him.

The Marchioness smiled kindly at Anna. "I couldn't have said it better myself." She nodded.

"Thank you, M'lord, M'Lady." She bowed slightly.

When they looked away the pretty maid lifted up to her tippy-toes and whispered harshly into her boy's ear. Meanwhile, Mr. Carson gave the Lady's Maid wide eyes of disapproval and covertly tilted his head for the two of them to go downstairs to grab the next course. The table slyly watched as Mrs. Baxter and Mr. Mosley arrived to clear away the dishes, while Anna Bates snatched the red faced teen's hand and lead him away like he was still her small child.

When they were gone, Annabelle cleared her throat. "I'd watch that one, Carson." She said haughtily, swirling her wine with an upraised arm. "He's starting to sound like that cracked George Crawley." There, clearly, was never a more damning comparison from a Lady of the highest birth in the land.

There was a cold draft that fell over the table at the rebuke in the name. Carson immediately turned in shock to Mary. The woman was mid bite, before insulted and fiery eyes met her old butler's. For a moment it looked as if the ravishing beauty would leap across the table and open her cousin's throat with her fork. Meanwhile there was a collected grumbling from several guests in agreement with Lady Gosford. It was a sentiment clearly shared by many of the aristocrats, that nothing worst could be said of any youth.

"As you say … M'Lady." It was all Carson could manage to reply, hesitating in pride swallowing obedience. He'd love to tell off the spoiled brat, he had been wishing it for many long years. All the times that she had made his Lady Mary's life so miserable. It was now unthinkable that this bold villain, dressed like a harlot, would insult a member of the family, the very master of the house. But he was too disciplined to be like the rash Mr. Bates Jr. though he thanked god that the fiery young man wasn't here to hear Lady Gosford besmirch his hero.

"Quite, I say. The very example of what I was talking about." The Lord of Acorn Hall announced. "One of Churchill's principle war mongers." He ranted.

Cinderhill nodded. "He believed the Nazi and the Soviet were both our enemies. He fought socialists as often as he was famed for fighting The BUF on Cable Street. I heard he even drew his famed Red Indian Knife on old Oswald Mosley in Lord and Lady Grantham's own drawing room." He shook his head with a scoffed laugh of scorn.

"It wasn't as bad as … all that." Edith tried to defend but it fell flat. All they had to do was go to the end table that came with Granny's dowry to find the scar where had had twirled and slammed his knife down in intimidation on that 'contentious' evening.

"The chap seemed content on fighting the entire world." There was nothing but condemnation in the amused mockery in shifty Lord Springborough's voice as he haughtily recalled the old gossip.

"And a Zionist!" The Duchess added in shrill disapproval, fanning herself to cool the outrage. "What honorable Englishman would ever wish to surrender an entire colony of Empire … to Jews?" She sneered, turning to Lady Grantham as if looking for sympathy. What she got was a coldly blank look back. Seeing that there was a possibility within their lovely hostess's eyes of a smack, the Duchess suddenly remembered what table she was sitting at, and drained her wine in one knock back.

"Because he's cracked, that's why, Duchess." Annabelle took pleasure in the distinction with a chortle. "Cultist Hausa Shamans practicing black African bush sorcery in the bayous and plantations outside of New Orleans, fighting Mexican Banditos who rode with Poncho Villa in a border town, a battle of wits against a Haitian Voodoo Witch Doctor in a back alley New Orleans shop for a map of a cemetery? It's beyond the pale of absurdity." She laughed. "Of course he wanted to fight the world …" She said, unable to hide the deepest distain for the perceived "half-breed" born of love and not advantageous marriage.

"He might as well have been raised by wolves." She snarled as she waited for the next course.

There was something presumptuous and fully arrogant about the most vocal of guests at the Grantham dinner table. No one opened their mouth in defense, not out of hospitality, but simply, because it dawned on the Crawley family of a grave mistake of perception. It would seem from the pulse in the room, if not in society itself, that the slander and open insult of their heir and beloved son, was somehow okay, sanctioned. It was the assumption that, because, George Crawley had fallen out, had come to disfavor with his family, that somehow he was free game to insult at will in their presence. They even went so far as to assume that the Crawley's would join in.

A foul look came over Robert Crawley's face, his jaw tightened at the laughter. He looked ready to explode. He threw down his napkin, his whole being screamed paternal rage. But a bracing shake of Lady Grantham's head kept him stilled and even in appearance. But there was darkness of a deep anger visible within her rigid posture. They, together, were as insulted as they were mired in self-blame. How many years had hard feelings and martyrdom bred this idea that one of their children, their only male child, once removed or not, could be spoken of this way at their very own table?

"It is ungallant, as it is unfitting of a Lady or Gentlemen, sir, to slander a man that is not here to defend himself!" The old colonel spoke up angrily.

He did not only speak just for his affections of Lord and Lady Grantham, but for a fellow soldier. There wasn't a lad or old man that hadn't heard of the Ace Pilot and all he and his men had done in the last few months to fight off the Nazi. While he might not understand or approve of his wild and adventuring choice of life, his gallantry in battle and, most importantly, the high praise from his own men warranted him respect from one old fighter to a young one.

"I concur with the Colonel. Anyone who wishes to remain at this table, much less this house, will take heed in knowing that Captain Crawley is a hero within these halls!" Cora spoke harshly and sternly in warning as a proud and insulted mother might of her own child.

"Here, Here!" Shrimpie toasted.

" **Here, Here!"**

There were more than several men who took up a rousing call, drumming the table in support of the young man and the sentiment. The shaking of the crystal did wonders for Robert's temper. He was so glad that he had lived to see the day that good men, some from who he had served, would take up the old regimental show of admiration of honor to the gallantry in battle of one of his own children. When it was over, there was an annoyed sense of conceit on Lady Annabelle's face as she motioned Mosley to bring her more wine. But for Lady Mary, her eyes glassed over. It was the first time that Mary had ever heard her child addressed as Captain Crawley.

God, had it been that long since she had worried with all her stone heart for a young Captain to come home?

With a missing Captain Crawley, dinner by candle light, and talk of war, she could almost smell the lovely scent in Sybil's hair, the shine off the pommel of her Granny's cane, and the docile, knowing, eyes of Lavinia that glanced across the table at her. She knew, something told Mary that she had known even when she first met Matthew in London. And all it took was just the two of them, Matthew and Mary, to stand at one another's side to know that Lavinia never stood a chance. Sometimes she was frustrated, especially after Matthew's death, at all the lost time, the wasted years that they had spent on other people. Other times, she felt guilty of the manner in which she had taken him. Lavinia was a much nicer woman. Somehow she felt that she would've loved George. Even now, Mary felt that, somewhere, Lavinia loved him greatly. Maybe she had been the woman, the mother, their son deserved in the end.

Tom gripped Mary's hand and when she turned he was smiling at her sadly. He seemed to have heard her thoughts at the rank and name, and somehow, for a moment, thought the same thing. How perfectly wonderful it would've been if they were back in those days. Darling Sybil, tired, but still the most beautiful thing Mary and Tom had ever loved. Her dark blue eyes reached across the table, catching Mary mid conversation, and giving her the smirk of the simplest love in the world. It was a look only a few knew and had received. But it was worth more to those who received it than all the jewels in the world. And every day Tom and Mary missed it. At times like this, it forever felt as if something was missing, a vacancy that they had accepted but will never get used too.

JJ Bates and Anna arrived as Mrs. Baxter and Mr. Mosley cleared out with the dirty dishes. Edith looked on with suspicion and confusion. The Marchioness was not a stickler for tradition, but it seemed odd to see the Lady's Maids in the dining room. She paused before she spoke. "Carson …" She turned around. "Where's Thomas?" She asked in confusion.

With the candles and shadows, it seemed that instinct and nostalgia played a role in the natural order of assuming that Carson would be overseeing dinner. But now that Edith had asked, those who lived in Downton day to day, suddenly realized that Thomas Barrow was nowhere to be found. Which, was incidentally, very curious, indeed, since Mr. Barrow was, in fact, the Butler of the house.

"Yes, Carson, where is Thomas? It seems odd that the Butler would miss serving dinner." There was flippancy in Lord Grantham's tone. It had taken all his will power not to explode in anger at the insults to his grandson. Though the bomb's explosion had been contained in his chest, the fire from the explosion still escaped through his mouth.

Carson cleared his throat. "He and Mr. Bates walked down to the village, M'lord." There was something cryptic and ambiguous in his deep, trembled, voice.

"Golly …" Lady Grantham exclaimed as she served herself from JJ's tray. "I thought I'd die before I heard someone utter that sentence." She laughed.

"It is quite, odd." Edith frowned.

"What's this?" The Duchess asked with interest.

"Servant rivalries." Robert answered.

"Old and quite bitter one at that." Tom added with a deep familiarity of it.

Shrimpie grumbled. "War does make strange bed fellows." He sipped his wine.

"Very strange indeed." Mary said with silky blade in her velvet voice as she caught out the flirtation between Lord Cinderhill and her cousin Lady Gosford. The married woman's married suitor straightened his back to find his gentlemanly manner, but the offer he was giving to Annabelle McCordle seemed to be extended to Mary as well in the way he smiled at her.

If it were any other day … just to drive Annabelle up the roof, where she'd hopefully jump off … or at least have the decency to be struck by lightning. But not now, not when all she could think of was George. That life, that shameful fancy, it seemed to not appeal to her anymore. The only man she wanted to take her in his arms was her son. The only face she wanted to wake up too was her boy's. She was not washed clean, not made wholesome, but her gregarious pendence at the hands of violent lust was over. She felt a love that was breaking through her soul of stone. It consumed her in fourteen years of dormancy, and in the lyrics of the old song of her heart it spoke to only one person.

And it was as deep and chaste a love as it ever was supposed to be.

"I don't understand …" Edith glared. "Where could they be going at this time of night?" She asked.

"And in such ghastly weather as well." Lady Grantham's voice had a girlish concern.

Carson stood a little straighter. "They were hoping to find something, Your Ladyship." He grunted evasively.

"At this time of night?" The Lord of Acorn Hall asked with offense in the absurdity.

"I quite agree. There would be nothing open." Cora said with a coy petulance. She knew when someone was keeping something from her. She turned to the lady's maid leaning over her shoulder. "Anna?" She asked with puzzled concern. The pretty blonde focused on the pudding she was serving, before glancing up to catch her son's look of sadness.

She sympathetically turned to Lady Grantham, glassy eyed. "They went down to the village, hoping they might find Master George out there, Your, Your Ladyship." She finally said with emotions barely held back.

A deep silence fell over the table. They could hear a pin drop as the world stopped. Cora finished serving herself and looked down at her plate. She gave only a side-long glance to her speechless husband. It was just the slightest of looks, but it was all Lord Grantham needed. Of course, of course she knew. He took a deep breath and nodded. Edith bowed her head and quietly dug into the pudding. While Mary swallowed hard, sharing a glance with her Lady's Maid and friend. She gave a curt nod and a broken smirk in thanks. Even if Anna wasn't Mr. Bates, she knew to pass along the heartfelt sentiment.

"They should've said something …" Tom's stare burned a hole through a crystal vase. "I should've gone with them." There was a deep guilt in his voice.

"Yes, we both should have." Robert added with a trembled voice.

Amongst the family there was a chill that ran down their spine. Each one of them felt as small as a dinner crumb in that moment. They had put it off again, put him off. Everything could wait till the morning, when things cleared up. They had guests to entertain. They had a dinner to throw. It was the mootness of the routine, of what they knew. It never occurred to them, to any of them, that the storms be damned, to fan out, to search the woods all night, all day, till they found their boy, their hero. Robert Crawley's heart plunged to his stomach in shame.

Carson, seeing the downcast turn, spoke up. "It couldn't be helped, m'lord." He scoffed. "Thomas was inconsolable when Daisy told him about Captain Crawley. It was all we could do to keep him here. He didn't give anyone warning when he took off with a shotgun and lantern just before dinner, Mr. Bates in pursuit." He shook his head.

There was a long silence before Tom spoke. "Good men" he praised genuinely.

Robert mumbled in agreement. "You'll inform me when they both return?" He asked Carson. "I'd very much like to shake their hands." He turned back downcast.

There was sympathy in Carson's face. It took everything in his power not to place his hand on Lord Grantham's shoulder. "Very good, Your Lordship." He bowed gracefully and stepped back.

"As would I." Edith's golden eyes looked to be wet glass, the amber of flame reflected in her irises. Carson gave a curt nod to her as well.

"What's this?" The Duchess asked again, not seeming to understand what was going on. It was the look on the majority of their guest's faces. They had known about Major Aldridge. But they had no idea about the other thing, the quiet secret that slowly ate away at the host family's very souls.

Robert took a deep breath before he spoke. "We only speak of the great benefactor of our feast, the very man which everyone who sits at this table owes their lives too tonight." There was facetious showiness to the Lord's voice.

"Well, sir, pray tell us of this man, and we shall drink to him." The Lord of Acorn Hall raised his glass with spirit and jest in the shake of his jowls.

"Captain Crawley" Cora said with a hard look.

They waited for the joke, for the rug to be pulled out from under them by praising Lord Grantham. But that was never the case. There was nothing but a deep seriousness in the faces of the people who loved their hero. The guests went still in shock, especially those who had so eagerly mocked him before.

"It was Captain Crawley's Spitfire that came back for us today, who saved us from being torn apart, and who fought off and drew away the German planes pursuing us." The Marquis of Flintshire explained to the table. "His fighter is amongst the wreckage tonight." He ended sadly.

There was a quiet moment of reflection that settled over the party at the revelation. A deep uncomfortable and melancholy came over the table. It was one more reminder of a war that no one could escape. When the pause passed the old Lord of Acorn Hall, fat and content then, now looked to have a moment of dignity to him.

"Lord and Lady Grantham …" He said sincerely. "If I offended you tonight, I am sorry." There was something to the modesty in his truly regretful voice.

"Thank you." Lady Grantham nodded with withdrawn emotion.

While there was reconciliation on one side of the table, there was nothing but vengeance on the other. The darkest of angry looks was on Lady Edith's face. "I dare say ..." she called to her cousin Annabelle sharply. "Not bad for wolves, wouldn't you agree?" Her tone was dripping with a deep personal hatred.

The Countess moaned in amusement. Leaning back, she turned laconically to Edith with the most pleasant of toothy smiles. "Yes, darling, quite impressive …" She looked away a moment. "Though, wolves are pack animals." She replied. Then she turned back with the cruelest of venomous smiles. "They're liable to defend their own." She was sharp in mockery.

Mary's face was frozen in a blankly pleasant expression, but on the table her hand was balled in a fist that was shaking in fury. "Yes, well …" Mary smirked with a tilt of her head. "Some of our children are born to win medals of valor, others, well … they collect scrap metal in their little red wagons." Mary ripped with a smother of genteel savagery.

The explosion of the fired shot upon Annabelle's bow was devastating. Martin McCordle, Viscount of Gosford Park, was a mild asthmatic on course for several degrees from Cambridge. All of the subjects non-essential, his slight asthma would be only a problem in a highly moldy area. But when it was combined, he simply was too essential in other circumstances to join the army. Plus, Lady Gosford, his mother, had her eye on one of the Royal Princesses for quite some time, and Martin was far too important to be at war now.

It was what he had been raised to believe at any rate.

But now to be at the table in which all of the Crawley children and husbands, not only of age males, but girls as well, had joined the war. Annabelle's hypocrisy was becoming apparent in the eyes of many at the table. She could take all the shots she had wanted at George Crawley, but the young man was a war hero. Her Martin had been spared the fighting in France and in the skies over the south. But it reflected badly on the Gosford family, especially at the brink, when patriotism was at an all-time high. She wanted so desperately to squash the notion of heroism in the Grantham's prodigal mongrel in the minds of society. However, it was a losing war that was becoming apparent to Annabelle Gosford.

By trying to fight her son's corner, she would be alienating him by trying to take down a genuine hero of the kingdom. In her crusade against the young flyer and proven fighter she was running the risk of looking vulgar. She had remembered how her mama had broken herself in her war against Rose and their Aunt Cora. How society had cast Susan Flintshire out. Even if they had agreed with her stance, no one would dare do the things her mama had done, and think it tasteful.

Now she was running the same risk taking on a beloved war hero in the middle of the war. It was much more a dangerous task that could not be won. She was as of yet to slander George Crawley directly, and she withdrew any intention of it. All she had to do was look upon her father who simply shook his head at her. Everything in his face was a warning of the fate her mama faced, being thrown out in the dark from this very house. If she spoke her mind now, she felt that there would be only bad gossip of her behavior at the Lord Leftenant's own table. Lady Annabelle turned to Mary who was smirking, waiting, like a snake in the grass, for her lifelong rival to make the same grave mistake. She was waiting for her to personally insult one of the defenders of the Empire, a young man who had saved their lives.

It didn't happen.

"As you say, darling." She said condescendingly, sipping her wine with all of her innards clenched in fury.

An awkward silence fell over the company. After the horrible social missteps led by the bitter Lady Gosford and the near riot of blows at the table between Lord Grantham's daughters and their cousin, there was a sense of grasping at anything that might reset the night for everyone. As they ate their pudding in silence, the servants keeping at the ready, the Duchess would've leapt at anything to get clear the air of her earlier gaff of being on the wrong side of valor.

Suddenly, she felt a shutter of a cold chill run up her spine. A presence, so familiar to her, felt as if it was leaning right next to her. In her ear a cold breath whispered a foreign language. She immediately snapped to her right, only to find that no one was there.

"Are you alright, Your Grace?" Anna startled the woman as she refilled her wine glass.

The attractive enough younger woman, with a beaked nose and beauty mark on her cheek, quickly rounded on the Lady's Maid. "Was … was that you?!" She asked in irritation and startle. Lord and Lady Grantham, who flanked her, and Tom and Mary who were across from her, looked up at the woman.

"Was what, Your Grace?" The maid asked in puzzlement.

The woman smacked her lips in stutter, tapping a hand on her shoulder. "It was, as if, as if, my late mother was right next to me …" But when she was met with puzzled looks, she cleared her throat.

"Just must have been … my imagination." She smiled uneasily.

But when Cora looked down she saw that the Duchess's bare shoulders were covered in goose bumps. She placed her hand on the younger woman's comfortingly. "Can I help?" She asked kindly. The woman shook her head.

"Mm, no, just one of those things …" She drew out vaguely with an uncomfortable chortle.

Lady Grantham touched her own chest. "Oh, don't I know it? Those types of things happen to me all the time." She chuckled making her guest feel comforted in the energetic friendliness she spoke with.

But just then there was a powerful boom that rattled the house. The echo of a thunderhead ripped point blank, as if it had exploded right next to them. It was a deafening roar that sent everyone's heart into their throats. Suddenly, the doors burst open, the rush of oxygen swishing the candle light, causing many of them to go out. The room was cast into a dim darkness around them.

" _Mary!"_

Red tinted eyes went wide at the noise the rush of air made. It was as if it was a voice, a voice that was the very sound of her beating heart. It was alarmed, concerned, and desperate. She spoke his name in a frightened whisper, the very sound of the voice calling to her filled her, like the lighting of old electrical fuses. Some bulbs shattered in the surge, but others lit as if it was yesterday. And for one moment she was his Mary again.

"Matthew?"

She whispered looking around. But no one heard her, and no one heard him either. To all of them around her it was nothing but just a gust of wind. There were screams and curses at the unnatural blow. Guests covered themselves, or held their glasses in place.

"Don't panic everyone! Don't panic!" Lady Grantham exclaimed calmly, though stress ever pushed up against her vocal tones. She turned to Mr. Carson without a word, motioning to the dining room doors that had exploded open.

"Mr. Bates if you'll come with me. Anna, Mrs. Baxter, if you'd relight the candles." Carson commanded like an experienced captain of a ship during a storm. The staff moved immediately with purpose. While the rest of the guests sat in place, observing the darkness, talking to the person next to them about the commotion. Tom, noticing Mary's shock and fright, placed a hand on her arm. She didn't say a word, simply grabbed Tom's hand and held it. From close by, Edith and Tom shared a puzzled look. Neither of them had ever seen Mary so shaken before. But then none of them had been in a battle either, till today. They'd forgive any jumpy nerves tonight and for months to come.

But while Lady Grantham speculated with Lord Flintshire about the causes of it, and Robert spoke to the Colonel of a good surprise keeping the blood flowing. The glint of something in the corner of the room drew the Duchess's stare. On a cherry wood serving table that came with the fifth Countess's dowry, was a two handed challis made of ordinate silver. The ancient looking relic had almost realistic vine and ivy work crafted into the silver. But what captured the younger woman's shocked attention was that the challis had softly glowing azure Aramaic symbols all over its body. It was as if something, someone's presence, its very master, was close by. Thus, so suddenly, had it come to life in its close proximity to him. Her eyes were wide as she stared at the glowing cup, feeling her body shake at the supernatural sight that accompanied the frightening disturbance …

Or that caused it.

Slowly the dining room was lit anew by the match and hand of the maids. The noises of the storm ceased and so suddenly the night grew deathly silent around them. The long shadows created by candlelight crept up the high walls of the elongated room. And slowly, the symbols on the challis faded away till there was no sign of them at all. But the corkscrewing feeling down the Duchess's spine didn't fade in the slightest. She looked across from the white cloth table to Lady Mary who had the same look on her conflicted face.

Did they really see and hear what they did? Or was it all the symptoms of the hardships of this war?

"No need to worry, M'Lords, M'Ladies …" Carson walked back inside with JJ behind him. "It seems that someone left the front door open." He explained.

"And didn't even have the common courtesy to wipe or dry his boots neither." JJ said in annoyance. He had just cleaned that area too.

Carson, irritation in his face, motioned the footman back to his post. "Not to worry, Your Ladyship, It was just a simple mixture of storm gust and change of air temperature." He addressed them with a gentlemanly ease of comfort.

Tom frowned. "Who was using the front door?" He asked.

"Have Thomas and Bates returned?" Lady Edith seemed hopeful.

"I don't think so, M'Lady." Anna replied. "They wouldn't have used the front door." She explained. "And had they found Captain Crawley, they'd not keep it a secret from her Ladyship." The maid nodded before she turned her back to refill the pudding wine, Robert catching the woman wiping her eye as she passed.

The conversation of the culprit who had left the door open would've continued if the Duchess hadn't cut in. "Lady Grantham …" Her voice trembled as she stared at the relic that had gone inanimate and dormant, sitting forgotten once again in the Crawley dining room. "Where did you get that, thing?" She was positively shaken in her voice, pointing to the seemingly Inconsequential decoration.

Lady Grantham smirked happily at the question. She thanked God, quietly, that there was something to talk about that didn't have to do with war or open doors. "You know, the truth is, I don't know really …" She shook her head squinting. "John, if you'd bring it over to me?" She asked.

But when the young footman turned, he immediately paused upon seeing the object that Lady Grantham wanted. Instead of obeying, the boy took a visible step back in fright. Several watching members of the party frowned at the odd reaction. Rather than pressing, Cora turned to Anna, to find that even the boy's mother looked anxious upon being reminded, placing a hand on her hip and shifting her eyes back to the table. Even Mrs. Baxter shrank away from it. Mr. Carson glared in a deep confusion at the strange reaction they were all giving. It was known throughout the house that the servants, every last one, hated the challis and were deathly frightened of it. But none of the family nor Mr. and Mrs. Carson knew why. They had heard silly things such as it glowing blue sometimes at night and hearing a whispering voice of a departed loved one speaking an ancient foreign language. No one wanted to go near it, even if Mrs. Hughes considered it all just a bunch of wild stories born of exhaustion. But there had been no denying that there had been too many strange things going on in the house since it arrived.

Carson irritably grumbled incoherently at his staff as he stalked over and snatched the silver chalice from its place. Quietly and with a professional touch, he walked over and, with a trembling hand; he held it out to Lady Grantham. Seeing how bad sixteen years of a disease had taken on the old butler, there was a deep shame amongst the dinner staff for their inaction. Taking the cup from the old man, Cora place a hand on Carson's shaking one. It was just a moment, a flash, of a sorrowful kindness in the raven haired woman for the man that had helped her build a household, a family that was her own. So many of her friends spent years at war with their butlers, fighting agents implanted by unsatisfied dowager mother-in-laws. She knew she had been blessed, when Charlie Carson did not miss a step in welcoming the new bride to Downton. And when the old Earl died, Carson did everything he could to make the house into her and the girl's home after years in London.

An unsure, untested, and sometimes scared teenage girl would forever be grateful to the curmudgeonly old butler.

Taking his leave, Carson received a smirk and nod from Lady Mary in reassurance after revealing the awful tremor to their guests. He tried to remain stone faced, but there was a deep affection in the way he looked at the woman as he returned to his place behind Edith.

"A suburb piece!" Lord Springborough complimented as Lady Grantham took it in her hands and observed it. Robert would've commented that of course he'd think so. Thieves always did have a good eye for silver. But he was cut off by a smirking Cora that shook her head.

"Yes, it's very fine." She agreed with a poignant look to her sighing husband.

"How did you come by it?" The Duchess was quite serious staring at the item in Cora's grasp.

She squinted in revelry. "It was given to me for my birthday several years ago." She explained. "It was sent by the post, in a package. It was addressed to me from an anonymous poster from Algeria, I think." She frowned in puzzlement. "I've asked his Lordship if we know anyone in posting around that area." She looked over at Robert. "But we can't seem to think of anybody, since it's a French territory." The two shook their heads in unison.

"I'd watch my back, Lord Grantham. A man that can give our wives such rich and exquisite gifts must be stopped at all costs." The Colonel said.

"Yes, I've often thought on the question of the chalice. I've had my man clean my grandfather's dueling pistols in case he sends Lady Grantham porcelain, next." Robert replied. There was a good natured ripple of chuckles across the table.

Cora smirked, moving over to Shrimpie for his opinion "Lord Flintshire" she turned. "You wouldn't happen to know anyone in North Africa, would you …?" She trailed off when she came face to face with a man who only stared at the item in Lady Grantham's grasp with distant eyes of the deepest sadness and horrible shock to see it here, of all places.

It was abundantly clear that Lord Flintshire was deeply and intimately familiar with the relic.

"Good God …" He swallowed in shock of the inconceivable in front of him. "Good, good lord." He shuttered. Glancing away a moment, catching his breath, he drained the last of his wine. The entire table looked at the man, breaking away from ancillary conversations to absorb the strange reaction. He gave a deep sigh and blew it out emotionally, before he returned to Cora with the wilting smirk.

"It's, uh, very fine Lady Grantham. It's a true masterpiece of craftsmanship." His hand trembled in sight of the item.

Cora studied him carefully, looking down at the chalice in hand. "Shrimpie …" She frowned studiously. "Do you know of this item?" She asked carefully.

"Yes, uh, uh …" There was sweat on the man's brow, he looked anxious in old memories. "Quite, uh …" his breath shook. He swallowed and sighed. "Quite regrettably so …" He turned and stared at the ordinate object. He shook his head. "I, I always wondered what he … what he did with it." He wiped his brow, snorting a breath through his nostrils. "I always imagined it at the bottom of the Mediterranean, I suppose, but, but not, not here." He smirked shakily and shook his head.

Edith spoke up in interest. "You know who sent this to Mama, Lord Flintshire?" She asked.

"Mm, do tell, we all love a good mystery." Mary pried with haughty swirl of her drink.

"Especially ones that are solved." Tom added.

Shrimpie breathed heavily through his nose. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. For a long moment he drew out the silence.

"Come papa, we can all hear the drum roll." Annabelle said sarcastically.

"Shrimpie?" Cora glared suspiciously.

"It was George." He finally answered.

With it finally out in the open there was a wide array of reactions. Mary didn't seem to be ready to hear that. She looked stricken and regretful all over again, Matthew's voice from earlier somehow swirling in her mind. Tom and Edith smiled softly at the sudden emotional look on Lady Grantham's face. She turned to Robert speechlessly to which her husband looked sorrowful, but smiled with a nod. He had been exiled, cast out, and yet George Crawley, seemingly, still had sent his Grandmother, the only mother he had ever truly known, a birthday gift. But Shrimpie saw their reaction and felt guilty.

Nothing was as it seemed.

"Lady Grantham …" There was some alarm when he saw Cora hug it to her chest in new appreciation. "What you hold is the Grail of Prague." He said very seriously as if she was cuddling with dynamite. "George and Sybbie, I mean, Lady Sybil, spent a considerable amount of time in London looking for a Turk who knew the particulars of the path to its whereabouts." He explained carefully.

"I don't …" Cora started in confusion.

"It's that damned treasure that he left here for." Mary said sharply. "That's what Shrimpie is trying to tell you, Mama." There was a coldness that buried deep and punched her in the heart. "He sent his trinket back to us." Mary threw down her napkin. "Too rub my nose in it!" She said angrily.

She felt the sting of one more humiliation in front of society perpetuated by her son's war upon her. All the old anger, the memories of the bitterness of fourteen years came flooding back. But now there was not retribution in her mind, not outrage. It saddened her to near tears that this was all she had of her son to remember him by. A picture and a couple of medals in the Library, and his damned fortune and glory, sent to vex her. Their competition, their mean-spiritedness, the waste of a life, was all she had of her boy.

Shrimpie immediately saw the sour and saddened look on the Crawley's. "You misunderstand me …" He said quickly. He paused in discomfort of putting it in blunt terms. "The Nazi African Corp. and their expeditionary forces in Spain, burned over two dozen towns, and killed hundreds of men, women, and children. They slaughtered many priests and monks in their cathedrals and monasteries. They cut a swath of murder and fire through Prague, Basque, Morocco, and Acre. All so they might get their hands on that Jewish relic." He explained with a hard face. The sights, sounds, and most of all the smell of the fiery massacres in the German expeditions in Spain and North Africa would haunt the old man till his dying day. "And when George acquired it, he sent it here. Not to "rub your face in it", as Lady Mary said. The Field Marshall of the German Cultural Ministry placed quite the bounty on his head for that thing." He explained. "So, I imagine he sent it here, knowing that it would be safe at home, and safe with his family." He placed a comforting hand on Cora's arm. He made an agreeable noise and gave a curt nod of truth to his explanation.

"My, my, Cousin Mary …" Annabelle said with a rude mocking voice. "With the old Ottoman Princess, the eldest family in New York, and now the Nazis, your son sure knows how to make friends." She sounded snobbish and sharp. "I dare say, with all the prices on his head, the man who killed, oh, pardon me, I mean _kills_ George Crawley, might not be the richest man in the world, but he'll certainly be the most diversified." There was a haughty laugh on her lips as she sipped more wine. But when she looked up, no one was laughing, especially Lady Grantham. She simply shrugged at the outrage and signaled for more wine. She felt Lord Grantham and his staff melting her head with furious stares of the deepest contempt at the light she made of their missing hero.

"What did the Nazis want with it?"

This time there was no shock or even a glance back when John Jr. spoke up from his post behind Lord Grantham. The whole table was thankful of the awkwardness of the unraveling Lady Gosford being covered by the deeply curious footman whose imagination had been captured. Also it was the very same question they were all thinking. Shrimpie was glaring at his daughter, mustering enough conviction to find a way of cutting her off of the alcohol before she completely turned into her mother. But to the question he grunted.

"It used to belong to the Jewish people of Prague. It was brought over in the ninth or tenth century by a rabbi. It's was used in ceremonies, sacred, very ancient. Legend has it that it was the cup used in the ceremony that brought the "Golem of Prague" to life in the medieval times. The lore goes that it has the power to bring life." Shrimpie did his best, and successfully, to make it all sound mysterious and fun. A natural and entertaining storyteller, he knew how to play to the crowd. But deep down he was very uneasy around the object, knowing what it could do.

"Bring life … from the dead?" The Duchess asked, rubbing the shoulder where she had felt the icy hand of her late mother.

Shrimpie simply smirked. "Just life …" He said quickly, too quickly, as he shook his head.

"And just a story." Tom helped with a strong conviction. But when he turned to Mary, hoping she'd be on his side. The woman was transfixed on the cup.

"A very entertaining one." Edith said catching Mary's slack in helping Tom.

Robert turned. "Lady Edith is our novelist and chronicler, I say, there's much you could do with a story like that." He encouraged.

"Oh …" She shook her head. "Where to begin?" She played off with a charming smile that was made less easy by the way Mary stared at the chalice.

"Mary?" Tom said with some concern. It was enough to make Lady Grantham look across to her daughter.

The bombshell smirked privately. "Just a … a thought." She turned back in reassurance to Tom and Edith. Quietly she ate her pudding, eyes flicking back to the Grail in her mother's hand with conflicted eyes that still couldn't quite make what she had heard in the wind.

"Such nonsense!" The Colonel replied. "What ignorant savages we fight." He bristled. "To believe in such fairy and bedtime tales, so much so they'd destroy such life, such innocent life chasing fantasy and illusion. Shameful, I say, very frightfully shameful, indeed!" He mumbled.

"This Hitler has a love for the supernatural and occultist objects. He thinks it gives him and his men power." Edith said. "He's led Incursions in Norway, Denmark, as well as the Orient, looking for these items of ancient power." She shook her head. "He seems a vile and vain man." She said with disdain.

"The people of those villages he raids would put it more roughly." Tom replied.

"The people of London would put it more roughly." Mary said distractedly.

"I must admit, I put it more roughly just this afternoon." Robert added.

There was a chortle from the table. Each guest was trying to come to terms with what they had seen and felt that afternoon. They had been caught in the middle of a large and sudden battle, a bloody and desperate fist fight between RAF and Luftwaffe over the English countryside in the last summer bloom. There was humor, even if it was dark, to the absurdity of the events of the day and the grandeur of implausibility in the fancy show of the night. One moment they were huddled in a bomb shelter, the next they were thrown in the middle of the battle, and now they were in their finery, attending a dinner party in the witching hours of night.

This war had brought the strangest of contrasts to life.

For a long time Cora Crawley had been silent, staring at the item in her hand. But finally she spoke. Her eyes framed in morbid curiosity. "Tell me, Shrimpie, how did Captain Crawley come by this?" It was, after all, what he had left home, was exiled for. Now, three years later, to hold the item in hand, left her with many questions.

Despite everything, there was an infectious smirk of admiration on the old man's face. "That would be in a duel with Yensid Asud-Agahnim, the greatest magician of our age." He replied with a great endearing fondness for the strange and mysterious tales that postings on the frontiers could force him to bring to the stiffest of peerage dinner tables.

"Good lord, you make it sound like a story from a dime novel." Mary sounded somewhat disbelieving.

Shrimpie nodded. "Yes, well, the Colonial life, especially on the Orient, does make one feel like they're in one of Sultana Scheherazade's thousand tales." He freely admitted. "But it's purely the lay of the land, as I'm sure Lady Sybil has informed you of all of her and George's dangers." He nodded to Tom and Mary.

"No … not really." Tom suddenly became alarmed.

Shrimpie cleared his throat awkwardly. "Yes, well …" He sipped his wine avoiding the girl's father and the young man's mother's confused and worried stares from the new revelation.

"Come Shrimpie, don't leave us in suspense. A magic cup, far off lands, a magician's duel, you can hardly leave it at that." Robert pressed, if nothing else to appease Cora's piece of mind from the tensions at the table.

"Indeed, sir, regale us with the story." The Lord of Acorn Hall spoke up. He was now squarely on not only Lord and Lady Grantham's side, but on George Crawley's side as well.

"Oh, I don't know if this is the forum for it." Shrimpie chuckled nervously.

He knew how hard it was for people back at home to understand the true rugged individualism that was the pre-war North Africa and Palestine posting. It was everything that they had heard of the American 'Wild West' in its most modern and deadliest forms. A burnt and scorched land filled with flagless Knife and gunfighters, swordsmen that had only loyalty to those who could pay for it. There were men of the highest government offices from every country that had no mind to service but for their own benefits, making unholy alliances with unscrupulous figures and silken sheikhs in search of fortunes. The dunes and forgotten temples of antiquity ran freely with mysticism, legend, treasure, crude, and blood. It was a truly unique experience made and lived by hard men, and not one that could fully be articulated to those who did not live in it, much less ones who had made their lives and wealth within the wholesome confines of the English countryside.

"Yes, it does seem rather odd that a tale of adventure by George Crawley not to have the distinct voice of Lady Hexham's pen telling it." Lord Springborough toasted Lady Edith. The golden woman nodded in appreciation. They had mocked and scorned George's tales of adventure, but that didn't mean they didn't love to read about them in 'The Sketch'.

"Shrimpie …" Lady Grantham frowned with a nod. "Tell me, please." She asked with a maternal sincerity.

When the old man looked around he saw a host of anticipating faces. But most of all he saw the sheer need of closure from the young man's family. He had left here with pain and rejection in his heart, and had gone on a true Arthurian quest of redemption for a failure that happened fourteen years ago. And now all his family was asking was to know what he found out there in the world, which could not be discovered with them. He scrubbed his beard and sighed heavily. He studied the cup and then the crowded dining room. He leaned back and looked up to a painting on the far wall, an author, a master storyteller trying to find the link between legend and truth.

After a long moment he started.

In early 1937 George Crawley had barely escaped Guernica before the air raid began. That next morning he watched the burning cinders from atop a hill, his eyes were haunted by a city lain waist by German bombers. He saw buildings collapsed onto one another, an ancient Spanish courtyard smoldering and stained completely black in incendiary scorch. He saw the burnt husk of mothers fused to their children that they were protecting from the heat of the fire bombs. During the massacre, a horse had gotten loose from a stable. Caught ablaze, it galloped, screeching in pain and fear, right for George. Drawing his father's Webley, the youth shot it as he leapt out of the way. After it ate the dirt he had left it alone to burn out. But now that morning had come, the smell of cooked meat was more than his hunger could reason. Feasting on the animal's cooked flesh, the youth looked out at the death and destruction and questioned, not for the first time, if there was anything that he was taught to believe in Downton that was true? After that night, he had changed, and there was no one in this world that could call him "boy" and truly mean it.

In his possession was a tattered silken cloth of a once beautiful Jewish Healer that had fallen in love with a knight. Concealed within the knight's tomb was the Lady's favor wrapped around his neck. It was the secret in a ransacked church that was entrusted to George by the dying priest. Embroidered in the favor was the location of the holy relic the girl used to heal the sick, a location that an SS Colonel would and had killed for. An evil man, a powerful man, hated and feared, he hunted George like a rabid hound. His Storm Troopers did not believe, did not think, lifeless and cruel, they only stopped to scavenge their fallen comrades that Matthew Crawley's revolver had felled. With only an hour behind him at all times, the teen had no choice but to detour as close to the fighting as possible to lose them. Life had made George Crawley tough, but traveling and fighting his way through the devastation and horrors of the Spanish Civil War had made him hard, taught him that sometimes in war …

There was no right side.

It was a truth melded with conviction, courage, and conflict at the very essence of a young man's soul. A truth that intrigued Alcazar Al-Azeem, the half Algerian smuggler captain who sat in the back of the candle lit bar room when the adventurer walked into the bustling sailor's tavern in the shadow of where 'The Cid' made his final stand. Under the calming sound of Spanish guitar and in the haze of sailor's smoke hanging over the active tavern, the man was willing to deal with a mysterious youth with an Red Indian Knife, old British revolver, doubled breasted leather coat, and haunted, haunted eyes.

George needed a ship out of Spain and to Alexandra Egypt. It would be easier said than done, as out on the water were two Italian cruisers on the prowl that had already pounded the city and sank several of Alcazar's competitors. The youth was willing to pay in British Pounds by wire from a London account. But the pirate needed something more real and in the moment. So in the spirit of compromise, he used his mastery of Robert Roger's tactics and experience as a rebel ranger on the bayous of New Orleans to aid the smuggler and his crew of pirates.

They needed supplies to sell in Egypt, and it just so happened that the Communist elements of the Republican Army had seized and salvaged many smuggler's cargo without paying. Led by the famed 'Captain Buck Rogers of the Runaways', the pirates followed George's lead to the warehouse where the supplies had been kept. During the heist, Alcazar was wounded by Spanish Communists. With his men leaving him behind, it was only George who came back for him. Using an Italian bombardment as cover, George and Alcazar waded under the docks till they got back to the assembly area. There, and quite against George's wishes, he was named an honorary member of the crew.

As demanded by tradition, and in order to satisfy the life debt Alcazar Al-Azeem owed to George, they must be bonded by blood of some sort. Having nothing personal he could offer, instead the Viscount of Downton Abbey, heir to the Earldom of Grantham, and future head of the Crawley family dynasty made a "highly questionable" spiritual gesture in order to satisfy honor as to not condemn Al-Azeem to slavery in his service.

"What kind of "highly questionable" gesture did he make?" Lady Mary interrupted the story.

"Well … I, uh …" Shrimpie drew out uncomfortably. "I'm not at liberty to give out such details." He cleared his throat. "But I'd be amiss, if I did not warn Lady Edith against venturing the Spanish coast and basically the entirety of the North African coastline. Least you meet you're quite dashing, dark, and very muscular… husband in waiting." He cleared his throat again.

Upon hearing Lord Flintshire, the Marchioness choked on her pudding, using a napkin for her spit-take. Giving a cough of surprise, Edith's golden eyes looked shocked. "But I'm already married!" She protested.

"Oh, George told him that, but Captain Alcazar is perfectly willing to be your second husband, your love slave if you so choose. You see, in his culture polygamy isn't quite as big a deal. Mm … I dare say, if I remember correctly, Lady Sybil once told me that Al-Azeem has several wives himself." Shrimpie explained to her as if going over the particulars of a standard business contract.

"Yes, Edith, I would say both of you would be coming to the table from positions of strength." Mary said with sensibility to her voice. But her beautiful face was trying with all her might not to crack into fits of laughter.

There was a mixture of outrage, intrigue, and flat out amusement from faces that all fell, like a waterfall of critique, on the Marchioness of Hexham. Lady Edith looked from her indignant father to the other side of the spectrum represented by her mother, who looked like she wanted to laugh. She was unsure how to feel about it all from the far range of emotions around her. Mary had a sly wink and toasted her, while Tom gave very confused thumbs up in apprehensive congratulations. Though obviously she would never go through with it, there was irony. So many times had her parents talked in bed of just finding her one husband, and now she potentially had two. Or, if she so wished, Edith just simply had a muscular, roguish, love slave.

"Crickey …"

After several more adventures, George disembarked at the busy British Port of Alexandra. He said farewell, for now, to the diverse crew of African, French Algerian, and Moroccan pirates. As was George Crawley's way, where he started off in contention with a band of misfits and roughens, his courage and character had him parting in brotherhood with men he now considered friends. It was a strangely Matthew Crawley gene, the ease of gaining admiration by deeds. Though, while his father had the ability to charm his unexpected peers in the aristocracy with his vision, manner, and upright morality, George had the ability to win over those of a less than savory nature. As it were, the son of Matthew was more a man of the people, than his father, who was considered a mundane nobody amongst the middle and lower class, and yet, strangely, was of high standing to the Peerage.

Several months after returning home from America, George had given his grandfather a piece of mind in his interest in joining a club. Lord Grantham had thought it the right step toward a sense of normalcy in the eventual transfer of power, of the way of things finally being observed properly. However he balked when he heard that not only George, but even Sybbie had joined the international Peregrinator's Club. Far from a gentlemen's club, the Peregrinator establishments catered to adventurers and explorers, old men with pipes talking of strange tales heard around cook fires in Africa and the artifacts in the drawing room that point to the existence of the lost island of Yamatai. At the time both Robert and Mary thought it absurd. But Cora had told them to leave the children alone. Robert wanted George to join a club, and he had, even got Sybbie to join him. There was nothing, despite what Sarah Bunting said, wrong with Sybbie and George being together all the time. Now it seemed to have been all part of the plan when George arrived, sweat soaked and smelling of the Mediterranean, at the Alexandria branch of the Peregrinator's Club. Fed and resupplied, George was greeted in the drawing room by, like-minded, old explorers who had their ear to the ground.

His destination was a small southern kingdom between British controlled Egypt and the Italian Colony of Libya. Over a brandy and steaks, the gentlemen, feeling the old electricity of "The Game being afoot" in the tales that George told, relayed him the news in great excitement. There was something strange brewing in the small city state kingdom in the deep desert. As a buffer between Fascist Italy and the back gateway to the Eastern British Empire, Black Shirt, Nazi, and English diplomats offered deals, counter-offers, and bribes to the benevolent ruler. The British thought that he was reliable in the growing tensions. After all, he had taken one of the British Aristocracy as his Sultana during the first Great War. She was the daughter of a titled professor at Oxford, bright and exceptionally kind. But now her father had written to the British Diplomatic Office, saying that he hadn't heard from his daughter in a year. And now they say that the Sultan had hidden himself away. He hadn't left his palace walls in quite some time, and was always surrounded by his guards.

George postulated that perhaps he was afraid of Italian or Nazi sabotage, as he only had one daughter and no heir by Islamic or British Law. But instead he was treated to something he did not expect. The excited old gentlemen spoke that his paranoia was born by the plague of threat from just one man who lived in the deep desert. This figure was a dark and evil sorcerer born of an angel mother who had been captured and enslaved by the blackest of Hell's demons. The denizens of the city claim that when he clawed from his mother's ethereal womb his birthing fluid was black. He was said to have been taught his trade by Lucifer himself. And that he had plucked the feathers from his enchained mother's wings in order to cast the most accursed spells of dark magic against his enemies.

This man was the vile and cunning magician Yensid Asud-Agahnim.

"Good God, that origin was oddly specific and … quite graphic."

"Robert, please don't spoil the story."

"Oh, uh, sorry, my darling."

However, to these claims, George wasn't wholly impressed. After facing the Cultist Preacher in the tomb in New Orleans, confronted with the face of true evil, surrounded in a hell of his insecurities and fears, he was unfazed by the wild stories. This scarab eater, hiding in the desert, whoever he was, didn't come from an angel's golden womb. Chemicals, illusions, and mirrors were what had been out there according to him. But, either way, he wasn't George's problem. No, George's real problem was trying to get to the kingdom in the first place. The British Army had cut off all roads in and out while a detachment of military and diplomatic officials of Empire went to investigate their ally's sudden reclusion.

But the club members were fully confident that it was a nonissue. Excitedly they showed the young man their "Magic Carpet" that would get them there. Well, at least they were excited when George saw that they had spent the last two years rebuilding an old Sopwith Camel bi-plane from spare parts. "The Government may own the roads, but no one owns the skies!" They had said with a cheer of spirit, shaking hands, and embracing one another in celebration, everyone that was, but the irritated and worried youth who stared at the sandblasted and rusted plane. Turning, he asked the burned out group of energetic old gentlemen who was going to fly the 'death trap'. But he knew in that moment he was asking a dumb question.

That next afternoon, the young man found himself sitting on a desert runway, in the pilot seat of a slapped together, ancient, British fighter. Meanwhile, two old gentlemen with a jolly bandit's temperament were stuffed in the back port. Both of them were bickering on who got to fire the aft machine gun in case of the danger they hoped would find them. George Crawley looked to the heavens and verbally stated to God, his patron saint aunt, Sybil, and his Father's ghost who was probably weeping in shame, that what he was about to commit was the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life. Then, he rubbed his stuffed doggy for luck and lowering his goggles, he started the plane engine. George would've liked to say that he was a good at piloting a plane. In fact one would've thought he would be a natural at flying by his future accomplishments. But in reality, that afternoon was filled with three people in a rusting bi-plane screaming in panic as the plane charged off the runway, barely clearing a sand dune. Meanwhile, below, a group of old men cheered them. They waved their hats in admiration, shouting their hopes that they find honor in their inevitable death out in the endless desert or at the hands of an evil sorcerer. They commended them for upholding the greatest of world traditions …

That being dead Englishmen found in places that they surely didn't belong, but were there anyway.

It was only George's second time piloting, ever. But what he had lacked in experience, he had in meticulous study. He had spent a childhood reading and rereading airplane manuals. So it was that he knew the written part of piloting backwards and forwards for many years. There was something thrilling and freeing charging through the air, above the hazy screen of desert heat. Their plane's shadow cast on the grand sands and half swallowed monuments to nameless ancient kings who thought they'd never be forgotten. But the problems began with one simple question.

"Wait, did this desert kingdom have an airfield?" Tom cut in with a frown.

"I was going to ask the same question." Edith agreed.

Shrimpie chuckled. "You asked the same question your nephew did." He sighed in reverent agitation of the old men. "Probably a lot nicer though." He drew out with eyes that hinted that no one wanted to be on the end of that blast.

George thought he had completely lost his mind when the old men both agreed that they never checked really. The British Government was so paranoid in the growing tensions in the region that they had confiscated all the maps of the kingdom, in case a Nazi or Black Shirt agent got their hands on it. So no one really knew if there was an airfield in the city, or what was in the kingdom in general anymore. As the moon began to rise, and the lamps of the city became visible, like a field of fireflies in the distance, George began punching the old men in their arms. They were offended as quickly as they were to point out that it was all moot when gunfire ripped a whole in the wing. When the sound of the plane echoed in the outskirts of the city, the royal guard began opening fire on them, believing the Sopwith to be a spy plane.

Losing altitude, they were headed right for the city. The young and inexperienced pilot knew he'd have to put it belly down on a street big enough to match the width of the plane and wasn't crowded. Smoke was trailing as the Sopwith fell from the sky. George, lifting his goggles up, closing one eye, he aimed for an empty and clear street. It led to a great open structure filled with vegetation in the middle of the desert. He thought it was their lucky day to find something so accommodating.

He was wrong.

The street had been cleared, because, the sultan was hosting his British and Italian guests in a ball within the covered oasis pavilion. The wide open street was to be his lavished ball guest's grand entrance. The long cobbled path was an unhurried, guided, vision of the beautiful gilded rose within the wild desert, which was supposed to be the ancient city. And now a rusting plane slid belly down fast and furious through the decked out street lit by multicolored lanterns. The crowded ball room was filled with panic and commotion, as Colonels, Generals, Diplomats, and Sheikhs rushed to cover their wives and mistresses. However, lucky for them, the teenage pilot had calculated the trajectory enough that the Sopwith came to a languid halt, just tipping its propeller and burnt engine inside the covered oasis's sacred pool.

The fancy dressed guests of multiple nations and empires came out of hiding from behind the mass of desert vegetation to gather around the downed plane. They were greeted by jubilant pilot and gunners who whooped and cheered, shaking one another's hands in congratulations of the dumbest luck of all. But when they were done they came to realize the company and the situation they were in. A dozen curved sabers were drawn at them from guards whose faces were covered by green silken turbans. Moving to the head of the curious guests and furious royal guards was the Marques of Flintshire, Hugh MacClare, The British's lead diplomat. The older man looked one part outraged, one part impressed, and wholly baffled to see young George Crawley in a place like this. Seeing as the pilot's cockpit was right next to the refreshment's table, the boy shamelessly took a finger-sandwich and greeted Shrimpie mid-chew.

At the Grantham dinner table there had never been a more in-synch moment as when all of the palms of the Crawley family found their faces in complete unison.

"Sounds about right …" Lady Grantham sighed ruefully embarrassed.

No one was quite sure how Shrimpie pulled it off, but somehow he found a way to talk the Royal Guards in sparing the … party crashers. He assured them, quite falsely, that George Crawley, the Viscount of Downton Abbey and his other titled companions were part of the diplomatic attachment. But the situation was graver than one thought. The Prime Minister, who was also the Grand Imam, wanted the boy's head for breaking tradition. A feisty George Crawley drew his revolver on him and asked the Holy Man which was faster, a sword or a bullet? Shrimpie was quick to use the boy's ill-advised leverage to speak in terms of international incidents versus local traditions, especially when it concerned the Grandson of the Lord Leftenant of the English King's Court. The Imam reluctantly called for the judgment of the Sultan on the matter, and that George, as the pilot and offender, would meet with him in two days' time.

When they got back to the consulate, Shrimpie was not at all happy to see the young man. Rose had written him of George's exile and his subsequent disappearance from all knowledge, once again. That would be half the problem. If George was still the Heir of Grantham it would be one thing to get him off. It's another if Lord Grantham decided to introduce a private bill in the House of Lords that would name Sybbie his heiress. In which case, George would go from somebody to nobody, and worse, a nobody who violated a sacred tradition in a foreign kingdom on the brink.

"Oh, oh god …" Robert Crawley looked like he was gonna be sick. And only his family knew why.

Shortly after George had left Downton that one stormy late December night, Lord Grantham had been incensed. For months he ranted angrily between bitterly weeping in the privacy of his wife's arms. He was filled with anger, with desperation, and with hopelessness. He had, in those dark days, planned to go to London to introduce a bill that would name Sybbie heiress of everything. Cora demanded he see reason, Edith told him to give it time, and Mary had nothing to say at all. But if George didn't want to be his heir, than he'd give it all to Sybbie. She was his darling and special girl who had her mother's love and her father's sense of moral duty to the people of the county. But before he left for London, Sybbie walked into the Drawing Room after dinner with his bill proposal she found. In front of everyone she ripped it in half, crumbled it up, and threw it into the fire. She had tears in her eyes as she swore she'd never forgive him. George was his heir, his only blood grandson. Downton, this decaying castle, was his home as much as it was hers. Sybbie would never let anyone steal it from him, from them, not ever.

Not even her most beloved Donk.

That night, Robert lay in bed wholly defeated. In the rejection of one grandchild, his rash action had forced another from the other. They both hated him, they both saw him as the villain. Cora told him that they didn't hate him, that he only needed to give them time. But the next day, Sybbie was going to University, and she didn't say goodbye to her grandfather, to her Donk. She was too mad, too hurt to see him. For weeks he was tormented as he sat in the library, remembering all the tea times, all the luncheons, and pre-dinners sitting at this table, lying on that spot on the rug, cuddled together in that corner of the sofa. He didn't know George all that well, god only knew how much that was true, but he had known Sybbie all her life. He had loved her so much from the moment he laid eyes on her. And she had changed him, helped him navigate the new world they live in. He didn't see the world in terms of how it would change his life, but how it would affect Sybbie, how it would affect Marigold. And that was all because of his love for that girl. That was why he went down to her college, why he caught her as she was just leaving class. It was why he didn't mind the tears in his eyes in front of her classmates when she leapt into his arms.

But in the end she made him promise, promise that he wouldn't go through with it. That he'd say it, swear it, that George would always, always, be his heir. That he'd not take away his home from him, not give him a reason not to come back to her, to all of them. One more time, Robert Crawley saw the world, not in how it would affect him, but how it would Sybbie. So his proposal to the House of Lords was not to name her his heiress, but to bestow her with a title that made her George's. Thus, in his promise to his special girl, he'd pray that when he died, his grandson would stand by his grave with Sybbie and do the right thing, whatever that may be to the two of them.

Now, some years later, Lord Grantham had no idea how close he had seemingly skirted disaster for his grandson in the burnt sands of an ancient frontier.

In the meantime, while Robert lay in bed tormented of Sybbie's angry words, George was being informed of the extreme situation in the isolated Kingdom between vast empires. The power structure had shifted in the British's long absence of care for the region. The Arab uprising in Palestine had brought the Empire's eye back to the Mid-East, and found the situation dangerous. Instead of Commonwealth interests being king within their North African territories, a religious fever had swept many of the regions. Instead of a Cambridge or Oxford educated gentlemen as Prime Minister, the Sultan, an Oxford man himself, had chosen the near radical Grand Imam to be the new Prime Minister. They had introduced a new, elite, force of Royal Guards, and had all but executed the old ones. But what troubled Shrimpie the most was that no one had seen the Sultan in a year nor his wife or daughter. They were all locked away in the palace. The Sultan had lost touch with his people, and with his allies. But what worried him more was that in the British's long absence, there was no one who knew him within the foreign office. So even visiting the Sultan seemed quite impossible, fore he only saw people he trusted.

George had informed Shrimpie that he had come there for the Grail of Prague, not to solve Britain's growing Jihadist problem in the Oriental Commonwealth. But the mention of the Grail only brought up more problems. And that became obvious when George met with the Jewish elders of the city. It seemed that the Prime Minister, with the express permission of the Sultan, had begun oppressing the Jewish population. While bigotry against the Jew was not uncommon in Muslim dominated countries, it did have the finger prints of Nazi influence as was the case in Palestine in which the Arab revolts had targeted mostly Hebrew settlements. It all culminated with the imprisonment of one of their ambassadors to the Royal family. Professor Jacob Abramov was a deeply educated man in the ways of science and mathematics. The old professor had been a tutor to the Princess in the old days. He was a quiet, thoughtful, and gentle man who had loved the Princess like a daughter. He was not beloved by the religious element in the city as a Jew who was educating a girl. But the Sultana, a daughter of a professor herself, insisted upon it. And as a man who indulged greatly in London as a student, the Sultan doted on his two treasures by breaking with many religious traditions. But now, as the Princess came into womanhood, she was locked away, and the Professor thrown in the dungeons.

Suddenly, George Crawley, in his coming meeting with the Sultan, had become a very popular man. The British Foreign Office wanted George to press the Sultan to find his loyalties and if the … British Military was needed. Meanwhile, the Jewish leaders begged the young adventurer to find a way to convince their reclusive leader to allow the Professor to go free. As a price, George asked for the Grail of Prague. It was a gift that they could not give him, for the Professor was the only one who knew where it was. But if he could free Abramov, they would allow George to take it. But before they agreed, the wizen old rabbi asked why George wanted such a relic. Surely, looking into his eyes, he saw that what he sought from it was not fortune and glory.

"What did he say?" Lady Mary's voice was suddenly on edge.

It was a question that she had spent more time than anyone, anyone in the world, asking herself. Why her son left, why he wanted that chalice so badly, and what it was that made him risk his life for it? With all of her soul she wanted to know, no, she had to know what it was. Her madness, her desperation for knowledge was only increased by Matthew's voice and the sight of a Spitfire run-a-ground where a car had once been flipped over.

Shrimpie looked at Mary for a long time. "To correct a mistake, some grave mistake that happened a long time ago." He did not specify anymore what mistake it was or whose mistake it was. There was, simply, a mistake that had to be corrected.

George Crawley thought that he could fix it with the item in his grandmother's hands. He thought that he could find his long sought after redemption within the cup infused with a great and terrible power. Whatever he had said to the rabbi, it was enough for him to give the boy a look of pity. The knowing look in the old man's eyes was already an answer to George. It was a silent warning that what he sought could not be found in the chalice. But, even if it wasn't, it didn't mean that he wasn't going to try anyway. Seeing the determination and, most of all, the courage within the young man, they all agreed on the price for the savior of one of their most important brothers.

It was a lot of pressure that so many people had put on the young man's shoulders. Lying on the consulate bench on the freezing night, watching the desert stars above, he had thought of home. He felt like a Knight of the Round Table, off in search of the Holy Grail. His quest was to heal the land, to bring life back to Camelot. It was why he was there, the power of the cup, it could save his family … it could return what had spent so long missing from it. And then he knew he'd be redeemed for his failure to save his baby sister.

On the appointed day of his meeting with the Sultan, George requested to speak with Professor Abramov. Until judgment was handed down, as law, he was a personal guest of the Sultan. Thus within his rights to make any request of his host. And thus, as such, they took him to where the old professor was being held. What he saw angered and appalled him.

The old man was kept in a metal cage in the center of the city. There he was chained by foot and by neck to a wooden poll within the cage. He was a barefoot, pitiful old man dressed in a ragged and torn tweed suit. He was balding, but his disheveled hair had grown long in the back. His glasses were askew and broken on his face. All around his cage, children walking by and old women in veils cursed and laughed at the old man. They threw rotted market grocery, kicked sand, and spat at him. All the while the old man ran to and fro, like an abused animal, shouting in Arabic at them. He had gone half mad in the heat and lack of water, brought to him only once in two days. The very minimum needed to keep the hated Jew alive.

"Such beastly behavior!" The Colonel exclaimed.

"The poor man." Edith looked very bothered and emotional over it.

Tom looked emotionally stricken as well. "There was a time in our own history in which we weren't so different." He argued quietly.

"But we aren't now!" Mary exclaimed in almost rebuke of Tom's comment. "No one deserved it then, and no one deserves it now, in these modern times." She slapped Tom down.

"Your son agreed with you, Lady Mary."

The crowd dispersed immediately when the crack of a revolver being fired in the air thundered over the prejudice shouts. All that was left was an old woman shouting insults and chastisement at the young man. But she soon scurried away when George kicked a rotten melon at her. The old professor was weeping in a daze of heat madness and despair when George squatted by him. He took a canteen and offered it to the old man. One of the local guards protested that he had his water yesterday. But George informed him of his status as the Sultan's personal guest and asked the guard if he'd like to take the old man's place? Not another word was said as the young man kept the Professor from floundering. He asked him questions, where the Grail was, where the Princess was, why he was imprisoned? But the old man said only one thing to George, grasping his leather jacket's lapels between the bars in desperation to be heard.

Nothing was as it seemed.

As George entered the golden domed palace, a majestic mixture of Arabian architecture and Byzantine décor, he thought of the old sayings about him in Downton. That he had so many adventures, because, he was always on the run from responsibility. George Crawley crumbled under real pressure, when people needed him the most. He heard it in his mother's voice that ran in his head, when he thought of the British Foreign Office, the Jews, and his own family back at home. Long years of suffering faced his mother, oppression faced the Jews, and all-out war faced the region if he could not gage the Sultan right. It didn't overwhelm him. He was, after all, his mother's son. It was a constant tick that made furious friend and ally alike in a young man's arrogance in belief that he could simply turn the tide, because, he was himself.

There was a strange repetition that the young man noticed about the portraits of other sultans through the years. Whether on tapestry or canvas, if he had a long neck beard or clean shaven, Turban with a jewel and feather or a crown, they all had … the same pose. It was strangely Napoleonic. George had joked with one of the Royal Guards about the height of them, but he didn't respond. It was when George repeated the joke in Arabic that he felt something off. He'd understand if the guard didn't understand 'the King's Own', but it was suspicious when the eyes behind the full faced turban flickered to the teenager as if he didn't understand Arabic either. The guard watched nervously, when dark blue eyes glared suspiciously when the doors opened.

Inside, the Sultan was sitting in front of a chess board made of ivory and jade figures of animals from India. George wasn't sure what he was expecting, but the man wasn't quite it. He had Algerian features, something vaguely French about his close cropped curls and sideburns touched with white. He was a good looking man, almost feminine, like a dark skinned French courtier from the Rococo Era. He was dressed in all black silk and had a salt and pepper goat tea neatly trimmed. He seemed a bit of a dandy, but surprisingly pleasant and warm despite the talk on the street from the old Muslims and whiplashed Jews. He seemed to study George as much as George had studied him. He found the young adventurer's appearance and candor amusing.

After sitting across from the Sultan, George, without asking, made the first move on the board. There was a bit of the devil in the older man's smirk. It was charming, but chilling, predatory. As George had moved the first piece, the Sultan spoke first. He knew who he was. His wife was a subscriber to 'The Sketch' and had read Lady Edith's stories of George's adventures. He commended the Prime Minister for setting up this 'trial' for he had long to meet a man who had bested two magicians at such a young age. George was quiet as the game continued. It was by Allah's will that the winds of fortune had brought him here, for he had a Magician problem of his own. But the young man replied that he had never faced any magicians. Magicians simply play at illusion for money, entertainment. Men who dabble in powers beyond mortality's scope were something else entirely.

The Sultan digested the words, and then smiled. He nodded in complete agreement. He was wholly of the belief that they were, in fact, a step a part of regular men. The teenager was expecting a deeper level of hatred, from what he was told about The Sultan and the Magician. But the man in front of him seemed to almost admire this cancerous blight on his kingdom. Sensing George's suspicions, the Sultan laughed assuredly. He did not want his guest to misunderstand him. He hated his rival with a great passion. But he had spent so long in this isolated dust spot that one forgets what it is to have an enemy, to have the thrill of such strong feelings of hatred in one's soul.

Yensid Asud-Agahnim was a human calamity. He was a faceless man, skilled and versatile in a great many things. He was a danger to the very stability of the Kingdom. Great empires teeter on the brink of war with just the swish of his hand. Living out in the deep desert among the villagers, he had the ability to pit nation against nation, Super Power against Super Power. He had hundreds of thousands of men's lives within the palm of his hand. A dastardly and evil creature that seduced and enslaved women with his dark skills, who had literally pulled a sheet of silk over great men of power and made them disappear. He had even tricked the King of England in a performance for the ages. He was a master of illusion in which he made the just world of Allah, to a world of smoke and mirrors …

In which nothing was as it seemed.

But George wasn't interested in Agahnim, what he was interested in was why the Sultan had imprisoned Professor Abramov. To the question, the older man seemed to fall into sorrow. There he told that Yensid, the magician, had saved his worst trick of all for the Sultan. For this vile man, lusting many years after the princess had bewitched her with his sorcery. He had cast a spell over her, so strong, so shameful in her adolescent lust that she had tried to escape the palace. His new guards had stopped her, and when they returned her, she was not herself. Snarling, thrashing, raving mad, she said that she had to be with this man, she had to go to him. He had always suspected that the old professor was aiding Agahnim, but then he had proof that he had tried to help the Princess leave the city, to go to that villain. So, he could not simply allow this man to be near his daughter. But when George asked for proof, a confession, the Sultan admitted that the old man still refused to give one. When they arrested him he was speaking madness, treason to anyone who would listen. It was a tragic day, such a bright man, a promising man, addled in the mind by such a dangerous wanderer.

Then, checking the Sultan's mini-statue of the Hindu god Shiva, George asked the Sultan what it would take for him to release the professor. Once again there was that devilish grin on the older man's face. For a long time the Sultan studied the board, trying to find a way to out maneuver the young Viscount. When he couldn't find a path to victory, he spoke of the sadness of watching the slow erosion of his house to this monstrous enemy. His desert rose and his old friend, all locked away. His wife with a troubled mind, bed ridden by the shock of the shameful lust in their daughter's blackening soul. The only way to save them, to return them to normal, was for Yensid Asud-Agahnim to meet his end.

George won and lost in the same moment when he begrudgingly announced checkmate.

"He wanted George to kill him, didn't he?" Edith asked with troubled eyes.

Shrimpie nodded, avoiding whatever look that came over Lady Grantham and Lady Mary's face. "I dare say …" He rubbed his beard as he sighed and settled back with a creak of his chair.

The boys at the Empire's Consulate found the task to be a simple one. The Sultan informed his admired and respected guest of where they knew Yensid to be. But when George spoke to Shrimpie, he was uneasy about it. Something wasn't right in this place, he could feel it. The professor's warning weighing down each decision. If they had known were the magician was the entire time, why not go after him themselves? There was some variable that they were all missing here, and if war was on the brink, one false move could cost thousands of lives. Shrimpie agreed on caution, but it was over ruled by the Brigadier General who had specific orders from the King and Lord Chandler to make a speedy fix of the situations before the Italians have scouted the area, and spread their agents. Reluctantly, George, accompanied by a squad of Commonwealth riflemen from the 10th Poona Rifles out of Delhi, moved out into the deep desert on horseback.

For many weary weeks they trotted through scorched land filled with dust and desolation. It was a perilous trek in the pounding heat in the long distance between the city and the settlements at the Sahara's edge. They stopped Bedouin caravans along the way, asking directions, advice, and for gossip of the whereabouts of the human calamity, Agahnim. The professor's warnings had the young man suspicious of any Muslim or Royal help from the palace.

George was experienced enough Ranger to survive the climate, spending two years in the America's Southwestern badlands. But the Indian riflemen had a hard time. They were used to the moist and humid sheets of the Indian Jungles. But here, the heat was dry, and the need for water was constant and unquenching. They thought themselves doomed, for usually their officers were more concerned with how to get back to England alive, rather than worrying about their Commonwealth Levies. But, knowing that they were following an aristocrat was the worst luck of all. At the first sign of trouble they were expected to lay their lives down for him, if not, they'd be shot for cowardice.

However, lucky for them, George Crawley was Matthew Crawley's son. Not a British Officer and only an aristocrat by name, he helped the men, even carrying a heat struck Private on his back to save the horses. He ate with his men, talked with his men, cared for them, and listened to their stories on the frigid desert nights. In time the young man's legend grew, not by deeds alone, but by the fervor of the stories that men, such as the fifth squad of the 10th Poona Rifles, told of a young man who earned the respect of those he led.

On the third week they saw a spotlight of hope when a sheikh of an outliner village informed the company of an old man who lived at the edge of a rock formation. He didn't know about any magicians, but this man did, for a time, come and go from the city and back. But he hadn't in a long time. He stayed close, visiting to the village to doctor the sick. He helped a sick girl, and cured an ailing goat herder, whose death would've been the destitution of his young family. His ability with herbs and fungus turning them to medicine was near _magical_. Upon hearing of the miracle work this man in the deep desert was committing with chemicals had George and the Sergeant sharing a knowing look. They were convinced they had found their mark, hidden in the ruins of an ancient temple carved into a rock formation.

They decided to strike in the night, using the haloed moon as guide on their ambush. However, if they had taken a scout with them from the village they might have informed the company that the haloed moon was sign of a storm. And so it was that a mile from the temple a large sandstorm struck the area. The jungle moisture of the south smashed into the arid air of the desert creating thick blankets of dust, blotting out the sky, with the only light coming from the violent forks of lightning above the swirling abyss they were trapped inside. The darkness and confusion was so deep and dire that George had begun to wonder if they were already dead.

However, a covered figure with a lantern hanging from a long walking stick grabbed George's horse's reins. It had a head cover of a large jungle mammal's skull draped over cloth to shield his face. The man offered shelter to the colonial party. Seeing no choice in the matter, the teenage leader of the expedition, kept his men together as he allowed the mysterious figure to lead them to safety. They were led through dense abyss by lantern light to a stone carved cave whose entrance they could not see in the stormy night. Worn out, covered in dust, the companions were hazy but grateful of the modest surroundings, especially to see a reservoir in the center of the ancient sanctuary. It soon dawned on George and riflemen that they were inside the stone temple that the sheikh had spoken of.

Their host removed his jungle cat skulled veil to reveal a deeply tanned man with long white curls and bushy neck beard. His face sank as one who had lived through great tragedy, but there was no denying that once he was a handsome man. His clothing was ragged and torn, but they had once been expensive. When they asked the man his name, he replied that he had none now. He once had, but as was the way of the world, all things could be taken from him. What shocked George was that in front of his regional accent, was a clear speech of British education. In debt for their help, the young adventurer was willing to pay him for the hazard. But the old man did not want gold, only for them to sit by his fire and tell him of England, of London, of stories of green summers, white Christmases, and milk white debutantes in pearl and satin. He was a broken man, but once he was young, happy, and in love in Old London Town.

The next morning, George awoke before anyone else, and buckling his weapons to his side, he explored the temple. There he found, on an ancient altar, a make shift laboratory of chemicals and tonics used for making medicine, but also illusions and poisons. But what sealed the deal was a flyer from a back alley Parisian Circus of the grotesque and depraved. In master French artistry was an advertisement covered in graphic designs of medieval interpretations of winged demons and bat like creatures whispering in voluptuous angels ears and absconding with female saints. Over all of it was a great upper body of a faceless man, one part dressed in top hat and tails, the other in turban with emerald pin and sultan's robes. The curving, monk like, text boasted the magic, wonder, and horror, conjured by the great and dangerous 'Master of Nightmares' Yensid Asud-Agahnim.

George crumbled it in his hand.

When the old man awoke he found George standing over him with his revolver drawn. One last time, he asked for the man's name. But instead the wanderer only laughed and sat up. He was unafraid to find five Indian rifles now trained on him as well. He did not give his name, only expressed that he knew it was only a matter of time before "He" and the Germans would send someone to kill him. But he would not fight it, fore he had failed so many people, and found justice in this death. Fore he knew George Crawley, not by his Lady Aunt's magazine, but by the revolver and war medals he carried with him. He had once been a member of the British Army, and on a cold October in 1916, he was on the Somme. An artillery shell knocked him off his feet, and wounded him gravely. He thought he'd die out there in 'no man's land', but his platoon commander carried him on his back to the safety of the trench. His savior had earned that medal for his deed, and the wanderer owed his life to Matthew Crawley. Thus, it was only fitting that his son should end it here in the abyss of nothingness that he had made of the second chance the young man's father had given him. George drew his trigger back, when the man stood. Looking at the dark faces around him, he took a deep breath, and made a dignified, but extremely familiar, pose for his death. But after a long moment, George drew forward the hammer of his weapon. He did not kill this man. Finally, he understood what the professor had been trying to tell him …

Nothing was as it seemed.

"Heh …!"

Tom Branson was the first to make a noise as he shook his head. There was an amused half chuckle in incredulous disbelief. The rest of the dining room table had been completely enthralled in the story, listening intently, but seemed surprised, if not puzzled, till Tom spoke up. They all turned to the Irishman who scoffed.

"What is it, Tom?" Lady Grantham asked.

"Yes, I don't seem to understand either." The Duchess added on.

Tom looked around the table in surprise. "You mean … you don't understand? You don't see?" He asked.

"No, not at all." Mary watched her best friend with puzzlement.

"I dare say, I don't have a clue either." Robert agreed.

"Nothing's as it seems." He said as if it would clue everyone off. But it didn't. "Don't you see?" He explained. "Agahnim played the greatest trick of all. He made the Sultan disappear. The Magician is the Sultan and the Sultan is the Magician!" He laughed. "He switched their places." He only shook his head in amazement.

"My word …!" The Colonel exclaimed in half marvel and half outrage.

Edith frowned. "I don't understand." She shook her head.

Mary rolled her eyes. Oh, Edith …" She sighed as if she herself wasn't as confused just a second ago. "Remember what the Sultan said. "The Magician had the ability to make men of power disappear, he said that he what … pulled a silk sheet over the King's eyes? The Sultan in the palace was actually the Magician. The Magician sent George to kill the real Sultan. Good god, Edith." She shook her head.

"Mary …" Lady Grantham shot her daughter a chastising look.

The woman rolled her eyes. "I mean, honestly, Mama. It's really not that hard." She relented while Edith still put it together in her head.

It was a coup that happened a year ago. Spurned by the wind of revolution in the Arab revolts in Egypt and Palestine, the Grand Imam saw an opportunity to regain the Kingdom under true Islamic law. Forever did he resent the near apostate, disobedient, royal family, who took lightly the Prophet's holy teachings, and broke bread with Jews each night. However, his help came from German and Italian agents, who together, promised a Kingdom in return for alliance. The holy man took it without question and thus the accursed Magician to the Paris Gendarmerie and the upper classes husbands, Yensid Asud-Agahnim was recruited by Nazi agents. Within months, with the help of the Imam, they exploited the Kingdom's weaknesses and took over the palace in the night. Yensid had pulled it off so seamlessly, taking advantage of British negligence, and ancient customs that prohibited the Sultan to be seen by the people. No one seemed to notice at all that anything was amiss when it was over. They could've killed the Sultan, but instead, the enemy agent, ever the showman, decided to perform his greatest illusion, maybe the greatest that the world had ever seen. In one foul swoop he had taken the world's greatest powers to be his string puppets, while exiling the real Sultan to his hide out to live the rest of his life in irony. There would be no one in the whole world who would ever believe that the Sultan was who he said he was. Thus, slowly, together the Grand Imam and Magician began warping the kingdom without anyone even noticing.

George knew that he had been sent to kill the Sultan in order for the Nazis to convince the people of the duplicity of British rule. But halting in sight of Hitler's dream, the resolution to making things right would be a blood bath, and both George and the Sultan knew it. If they rode into the city and alerted the British detachment of the coup, the Poona Rifles and the 82nd New Zealand Afoot would storm into the city and exterminate every Arab Zealot and Co-conspirator. George didn't see a downside, except that the first thing they'd do was murder the Sultana and the Princess.

However there was a solution that presented itself.

A garrison of antique Martini-Henry Rifles and ancient Jezails pointed at George, the Sultan, and an outliner sheikh who stood in front of the palace gates and demanded single combat with the tribal leader. It was a last ditch loophole and only chance to save the Sultan's family.

"You see …" Shrimpie explained. "The Kingdom had existed since the Greeks conquered Egypt. It was made up of a certain tribe of people that were hunted by the Pharaohs for sport, and so they hid in the desert. Over the years they saw the conquests of the Romans, the Muslims, the Ottomans, the French, and finally the English. And their culture adapted and converted in different ways, but on a whole, on a principle!" Shrimpie held up his pointer finger to make his declarative. "They still remained a tribe. And tradition, as ancient as it was, suggested that a member of the tribe can challenge the leader in order to oust him."

And that was what George did. At first the Prime Minister scoffed at such a challenge, George was not one of them. But, then the Sheikh claimed the statement was a falsehood. Grateful to the Sultan for healing his villagers, he paid his debt gladly by inducting George into the tribe. The legitimacy of the challenge hung over all of the future Axis power's designs like a dark cloud. It was simple, desperate, completely bonkers, and quite brilliant. The people, a majority Islamic in faith, they still held to the old traditions of the tribe. If the 'rightful' sultan refused the challenge, he would forever bring shame upon the tribe. Thus, if the Imam and Agahnim wished to rule, the magician could not refuse to answer the challenge.

Angered, but intrigued, Agahnim met George on the draw bridge, the Imam and Royal Guard on his flanks. He wished to know in which manner the young fighter wished to duel. Turning to the Sultan, the older man gave a curt nod. And when George turned back, he proclaimed his choice.

They'd settle the dispute by the deadly magic trick, 'The Bullet Catch'.

"Oh, you can't be serious!" Mary exclaimed in utter confounded disbelief. "This Agahnim makes a living, a career, a life out of illusion, and he wanted to challenge him at his own game? Has he lost his senses?!" The young man's mother ranted.

Annabelle smirked at the moment of impropriety in her cousin's outburst. "Oh, I don't know, Cousin Mary." She said with a sing-song voice. "I'd say his arrogance had to have come from somewhere." She baited.

"Yes and Martin's large gut had to come from somewhere as well!"

"Mary!" Lady Grantham scolded in shock. "Apologize, right now." She lowered her voice to a hiss, fixing her daughter with a maternal glare.

The bombshell rolled her eyes to the ceiling with a petulant scoff. "Very well, Mama …" She turned to Lord Flintshire. "I'm sorry Shrimpie. It's very fitting on your family." She smiled sweetly. The older man didn't take offense, but instead chuckled, while Annabelle looked ready to fight Mary, and Cora just downed the rest of her wine.

"Continue if you'd please, sir." Robert rolled his eyes at his daughter.

The next morning, just as the violet and orange melted into the shining stars, crafting a beautiful coagulation of a messy painting of color and light, the two parties met on the draw bridge of the palace. George and the old Sultan stood across from Agahnim, the Imam, and the Captain of the Royal Guard. Between them, as go between was Lord Flintshire. The two parties had negotiated on procedure, rules, and weapon. George had offered that they use his revolver, but Yensid refused, the Algerian was well aware that Crawley knew the ins and outs of his own famed weapon. So instead, the Sultan offered the use of a ceremonial weapon, a British Enfield, cap and ball, revolver. It had been a gift to his grandfather by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria's visit many years ago. It was a gorgeous weapon, trimmed in golden Arabian scroll work, with a depiction of a famed cavalry charge during the Kingdom's resistance against Napoleon. Lord Flintshire was aghast that he'd ruin such a fine crafted weapon with such importance. But, the sultan said that when it came to the lives of those he loved the most there was no such importance to a mere object. Both combatants agreed to the weapon and to the Magician's one stipulation.

As a symbol of honor, each man would load the other's bullet to be used.

"He can't agree to that!" Tom protested. "He knows this man, the kind of bastard he is! A man like that is always scheming!" He shook his head.

"While I don't indorse Mr. Branson's language, I quite agree with him. I respect and heartened by Captain Crawley's integrity. But even the most honorable fox is still a fox when the hen house is left open." Robert said.

"I agree, I can't imagine what George was thinking." Lady Cora's outrage was still kept to a polite, societal, accepted girlish petulance. But her eyes were worried.

Shrimpie sighed. "I was hesitant myself in this manner. But I wasn't allowed to influence Captain Crawley one way or the other. So, both men agreed and load their one bullet in the chamber. The Captain of the Guard loaded for Agahnim, as obviously he didn't know how to load a cap and ball cartridge. But George loaded his own." Even though the table was worried, there was a twinkle in the storyteller's eyes as he relayed the information.

With a sweeping bow, Agahnim politely, with a courtly manner to his words, invited George to take the first shot. The young man was unfazed, grim, and coldly stiff. He accepted as the magician paced away to his ready position. He wiggled his fingers and bent his knees, as if getting ready to catch something. In the sudden quiet of the dueling ground, the magician slowly began to chant. As George aimed, pulling the hammer back, Agahnim began to chant louder and louder. As George squeezed an eye shut, the magician was screaming a spell, thumping his chest.

Then, George fired.

The sound of the old cap and ball pistol roared with thunderous roll over the dead quiet of the city. Bird's cawed and fluttered away from their palm tree perches. And then Yensid Asud-Agahnim hit the wooden boards with a heavy thud. Shrimpie, the Royal Guard, and the Imam with his clerics rushed over, while George blew the smoke from the barrel. But when they gathered around Agahnim, they were stunned. For the fallen Frenchman was laughing, laughing hysterically.

As caught in between his teeth was a smoking bullet.

There was a near riot at the dinner table as loud as the cheer that had went up from the palace ramparts. But not nearly as loud as the guttural, primal, war cry the false sultan roared into the air. He hopped up and down, pounding the draw bridge with his fist like a great ape. His actions encouraged the crowd to turn against the young and soon to be dead Viscount of Downton Abbey.

"That is impossible!" Lady Mary was out of sorts. "No man, however fast, could catch a bullet in his teeth!" She threw her napkin down.

The Marquis simply held his hands out. "I'm simply telling you what happened." He said, motioning for everyone to calm down. "I can only tell you, for now, what I saw. And as I live and die, the man had a smoking bullet in his mouth." He swore.

"Now everyone, everyone, calm down, if you'd please." Lady Grantham announced to all her family and guests. When the room grew quiet, the Countess turned to the man next to her.

"Then what happened?"

"Well, Lady Grantham, then it was Captain Crawley's turn …"

When Agahnim was done playing to the crowd, he strolled up to the stone faced young man. He expected some sort of reaction, crestfallen or angered, at least perplexed. But there was none of these things. He simply gave the ordinate pistol a gunfighter's twirl before handing it over to his opponent. The look in his eyes was exactly how Lady Edith's serials had described the youth in times of danger. There was not a falter to his step, or the betrayal of an expression on his handsome face. The palace and crowd on the other side was jeering and taunting the young man with loud and vicious rancor as he took his place. But unlike the magician, George did not make any attempt or ready himself for a catch. He simply stood his ground and narrowed his dark blue eyes in waiting.

His stance, his unwillingness to do anything, unnerved the crowd into a lull. There was a true gunfighter's stare to the youth with his mother's implacable icy glare. Meanwhile, the seemingly victorious magician suddenly felt as George and Shrimpie had after his meeting with Agahnim. He felt like he was missing something, that the young man, who was staring right through his very soul, knew something he didn't. It made him afraid. And eventually his fear turned to a rage that gnashed his teeth and widened his eyes.

So Yensid Asud-Agahnim, the greatest magician in the world, fired the killing shot.

 **BANG!**

Suddenly, Shrimpie slammed his fist on the table with a loud and heavy force. The table rattled, crystal tinkled, and the nervous Lord Springborough jumped out of his seat. The people at the table had been so enraptured by the story they had forgotten they weren't actually there, and that it had already happened some years ago.

A gasp and startle traveled around the table.

"The revolver exploded in Agahnim's hand, the bullet felling him and killing the Captain of the Guard!" Shrimpie finished with elation and animation for the table.

There was a long pause from everyone.

"What?!" The Duchess cried. "I don't believe it! How?" She questioned more to herself than to the storyteller.

Shrimpie got a little pleasure from the mismatched looks of relief, wonder, and confusion that had overcome the entire dining room table. "Shall I explain?" He postulated.

"Well, you jolly well better." Lady Edith had the pulse of the table with her flippant comment.

"You see, Lady Edith …" The older man chuckled. "The two duelists were playing a bit of mental chess, as it were. Each man was betting on a move from the other. The Magician had loaded a blank in his own chamber, knowing that George would use it. But George's counter move, knowing that the magician was false, used the blank on purpose in order to draw Agahnim into his own trap." He explained.

"Which was?" The Lord of Acorn Hall asked.

Shrimpie grinned proudly. "George over powdered the shot in his chamber. So when the magician fired George's round …" he trailed off.

"The pistol backfired and exploded." Tom was grinning ear to ear.

"Exactly …" Shrimpie lifted his glass. "It was a game of wits … check and mate." He toasted before drinking.

"And what of the smoking bullet in the magician's teeth?" Annabelle was the only passive, if not almost annoyed member of the party. She seemed very displeased having to sit through the entire story.

Shrimpie sighed. "It was an unused round that was treated with a little bit of cleaning acid that gave a smoky chemical reaction to the lead. Made it seem legitimate, so there would be no cause to think he cheated." He realized he was talking to himself when his daughter only cared for half of what he said.

With the story concluded there was a sense of enrichment in the shaky night. Minds still swam in the world and detail of imagination that had been relayed to party. Separate conversations being had in smaller groups on tidbits and items of fascination in subject to the story. Shrimpie had a private moment to smirk. Thinking, not for the first time, that if had told the true, unedited, story about what really happened …

He didn't think anyone would believe him.

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _Some Young Indiana Jones, a bit of Tin Tin, and a lot of inspiration from Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the dirty secret of this story is that beyond the source material and Young Indiana Jones. "The Minstrel Boy" takes a lot of inspiration from the story Ivanhoe._

 _In fact there's a ton of Easter Eggs from a lot of other franchises in this story. If you speak the geek, I'm sure you'll catch a few._

 _This is also a bit of a cautionary tale of what kinda happens when my imagination get on the loose, with no one to drag me back. You get 22K word stories about magician duels, history, and 1930's pulp adventure stuff._

 _If you're someone right now who is saying "What the fuck was that?" It actually didn't come out of nowhere, "The Grail of Prague" was introduced pretty early in this story, but it was mentioned off handedly a handful of times in passing. But I assure you, since its inception, it was always an important tool to this last act._

 _As to the person yelling at their computer "After three weeks, this is it, this is what you wrote? What the fuck did that have to do with anything?!"_

 _Let me tell you something irrationally angry reader …_

" _When this baby gets to 88 miles an hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!"_

 _And by that I mean next chapter._

 _PS. Shoutout to McFanciful who knows a little inside baseball about what the inception of this chapter came from._

" _There I was, surrounded by three Monstrous Trolls!"_


	21. An Ideal Marriage

_Before we start there is a note from me personally._

 _I've been waiting and planning and planting small details in the story for a year so that I can write this chapter. So, this is kinda a big deal for me as the writer. So with that in mind there is a Musical cue from the Downton Abbey Soundtrack that'll pop up toward the end of this chapter. If you so wish, when you get to that point, if you and play it, it should go with the end as I planned it a year ago. The Title of this chapter is the name of the track._

 _This particular one has been a long time coming, so enjoy it._

* * *

 **An Ideal Marriage**

In the Easter week of 1938 the London Season was alight with hot conversations of many things. Hitler had won more power in Germany, taking ninety-nine percent of the vote. The results of the Election were more oppressive Nazi laws against the Jews of Germany. The British Diplomatic Office was signing accords with the Italian government after several nasty incidents in North Africa that led to tensions between the two empires. And most troubling was the talk of the religious based violence with the Arab aggression against the Jews of Palestine and the British Army that protected them. They had heard reports of British Commonwealth Regiments and Hebrew militias fighting Arab Liberation forces in the West Bank. They called it "The Battle of Jenin" and there were many casualties.

The news of the battle caused some strange and very rare tension between Sybbie and Marigold. Marigold had stolen and read one of Sybbie's private correspondences, and whatever she had read had given the ballerina an anxiety attack. Rather than feeling sympathy for her little sister in everything but name, she burst into their room in the Grantham's London House and yelled at her. It seemed a fight that should've been had twelve years ago, but the teenage girl gave her cousin a good smacking and told her to never read her letters again. When questioned why Sybbie was so hard on Marigold, she simply, but cryptically, only said that both Marigold and she knew one of the volunteers in command of the Colonial Rangers made up of Indian Rifles and Hebrew guerrillas during the fighting. And he wrote to her, not Marigold! They'd like to press Sybbie on this young Ranger commander privately writing her, they chalked it all up to nerves.

After all, the eldest Grantham granddaughter was as talked about in the London Season as Hitler.

Lady Sybil Afton Branson was going to be presented to court that spring. The buzz was over the crowning of young Lady Sybil as Heiress to her cousin, George Crawley, last rumored to have killed an English Duke and General in North Africa. At the time of the ratification of Lord Grantham's private bill in the House of Lords, the seventeen year old girl was an afterthought. Lord Grantham's bill was just part of the February work load before the '37 Season really got underway. But a year later, what was building as a sentimental moment between Lady Grantham and her granddaughter as the last Crawley girl to be presented to court, turned into something different.

Before leaving for London, Sybbie slouched over the side of an ancient stone bridge next to her father. Together, Tom and his little girl played Poohsticks like usual. The girl was giggly and smiling, but she felt nervous. It was not of the task ahead, but of something else. She knew of her father's dislike of these things, these royalist and aristocratic ceremonies. Tom Branson would always be an Irish Independent at heart, even forever exiled from his home. So she asked him, in the safety of their special spot, if he was disappointed in her.

She was being presented to the historically oppressive English Court and a Hanoverian King to be officially known as 'one of them'. She didn't want her daddy to feel that she had let him down by failing in all her endeavors and content with living off the family money like all the other debutantes her age. It was a true fear the girl lived with. Though she never felt the weight of the ghosts that haunted George, it did not mean that the girl was so wholly unvisited upon by the specters of expectations. Her mother was something, somebody, special. And it seemed to Sybbie, the older she got, the more mistakes she made. She had lost her virginity to her Mama's fiancé, wrecked a car in a drag race in Ripon, and was kicked out of a prestigious University. She had been the first woman in the history of the grand and old institution to gain a scholarship for mathematics and Mechanical Engineering and she had thrown it all away drinking and fighting. She just didn't want this presentation to court to be a sign of defeat, of capitulation in the eyes of her father, on the memory of her feminist mother. She didn't want this time honored moment to seem like she was content to be a 'Lady' for the rest of her days, to run charities, attend Garden Parties, and organize dinners.

With tears in her eyes, she just didn't want her daddy or mother up above to think she was a failure.

Tom had taken his girl in his arms and kissed her head. He assured her that despite what the rest of their family said about Lady Sybil Crawley, she was far from perfect. Tom Branson had raised his daughter with Sybil ever on his lips, ever with a deeply human prospective. First hand, Tom witnessed the mistake everyone had made with Matthew when it came to George. No one talked about Matthew, and when they did, they described him as a saint, a moral man of the highest principles. They didn't talk about the man to his son, the real man. They set an impossible standard for the boy to never reach. They never talked about the man who was a little husky, who enjoyed more than a few helpings of cake. They never told George that he had once walked in on Matthew Crawley French kissing Edith on a table because they were drunk and angry at Mary for stealing Anthony Strallan. They never talked about how his father made horrible jokes at dinner that nobody laughed at but him. They didn't talk about how slow he was at realizing things. That he liked to grope his wife inappropriately in public to see if they'd get caught, or the smile that came over their faces when they did. Tom swore he'd never make that mistake with his daughter and Sybil.

Thus, he reminded Sybbie of all the faults, all the mistakes that her mother had made in her life, all the mistakes he had made as well. Lady Sybil Crawley Branson was not a saint, an ethereal creature, or a trail blazer. She was Sybbie's mammy, and she made mistakes, laughed, cried, and would love her baby forever. Everyone made mistakes, but that only meant that they were human, that Sybbie was human. And for the presentation, he had driven Sybil to hers many years ago. He might be an 'Irish Mick' in his heart, but she would always be his baby girl in his soul, and he'd always be proud of his daughter. In her father's eyes she felt loved unconditionally. She was suddenly reminded of the lonely existence of George who had none of these feelings of security or love from a parent. With that in mind, Sybbie held her father closer and thanked him for always being there, always loving her, and that she'd make him proud. But when they got to London …

Mary had already ruined everything.

It was at a tense dinner with Lady Annabelle McCordle and a few of the former debs that had come out with them in their year, in which Lady Mary had strategically let slip a little obscure detail. That being that Lady Sybil Branson would have quite the prospects. She was, after all, co-heiress to a motorcar fortune and, potentially, her Granny's Countess's Coronet. The news rippled in large shockwaves through London society. Suddenly, the parliament office was getting four or five phone calls an hour from Peers inquiring about Lord Grantham's bill late last winter. Suddenly, dowagers' and their successors came to call on Lady Grantham and Lady Hexham. When the Crawley's London house had been opened for the Season, stacks of cards and invitations were piled high on Mrs. Hugh's desk to be delivered to Lady Grantham and Sybbie. The Crawley dinners were the hottest invite in town. Every Baronet, Countess, and Duchess had brought their son along to Lady Grantham and Lady Edith's dinners in the hopes that they meet the beautiful and fresh Lady Sybil Branson. That week, Lady Mary had never felt more like a proud mama, till Sybbie told her she was the absolute worse in the world. Chasing after her, Mary called after Sybbie, calling her Sybil. She was no longer sure who she was addressing, her daughter or her baby sister, in the familiarity of the voice and dramatic outrage of the fleeing teenage girl.

When Mary and Edith had heard of the great big splash of Cora's first season in London when she was younger than them, it was all they wanted for themselves. Mary wanted the balls, the invitations, the dancing with uniformed men, and the proposals that her mama had gotten nightly from Valentine's Day to Easter. The London Season of Mary's eighteenth birthday was a fairy tale. She was the center of attention, the daughter of the honorable Lord Grantham and his fetching wife, the American Princess. And she thought that was what every girl wanted, it certainly was what she and Edith wanted. Even Sybil, who was knee deep in suffrage, came to be tempted by the adoration. As for Rose, she still talked about their intrigue with a future King's love letter as the best days of their lives. But Lady Mary quickly found out that their children didn't have a great love or romanticism of the Season that the Crawley girls had.

Each night, each day, Sybbie was being rushed by her aunts and Granny from a breakfast, brunch, luncheon, tea, ball, supper, and midnight ball. She was shaking hands, having her knuckles kissed, and curtsying to over two dozen people a day. All the time she was being flirted with, taken on tours of gaudy houses, and filling out a dance card. A dance card … who even used those anymore? But it was becoming her life. She tried to talk engines, cars, action-adventure serials at the Cinema, pulps, and even Howard Hughes. But no one spoke Sybbie, they only spoke Lady Mary. It was a steady language of singular nouns of self-reference in terms of fashion and gossip, food and wine, and where the best places to go on holiday were. They mentioned holidays, of course, because, they heard that Sybbie had been kicked out of University and her mama and daddy were sending her abroad. Suddenly it seemed that half of London society, from fellow debutantes vying for her friendship, to matronly titled ladies looking to give her a 'maternal' hand, and such 'bright' young man were all going abroad. They talked of Paris, Rome, Tuscany, the Alps of Switzerland, and a dozen little country sides, cozy little villages, and Riviera's all along the continent. It was perfect place, a perfect slice of land for romance, for a young girl to fall in love.

But that wasn't Sybbie.

But most of all, in every conversation, in every passing comment over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Whenever she danced with a young man, or talked in a group of people that always gathered around her. They all secretly congratulated her on being one of the first English Heiresses. At first she didn't understand what they meant. She was really only George's heiress until he got married. Or, most likely gets a woman pregnant. It would probably be someone inappropriate like a princess, or a sultan's daughter, or, you know, most likely Aunt Rose … because, if she was gonna be honest, George never made anything easy on himself. But suddenly, as the time passed, she began to realize what they meant. The name George Crawley had an immense amount of weight in the aristocracy, as means of getting rich fast.

Quickly, Sybbie, Marigold, Lady Grantham, Lady Edith, and most of all, Lady Mary learned a funny inside joke that had been started by the clever and dapper little chap, Charles Blake. In which if you're in need of a quick pound, or to retire from the ills of the world, just simply go "Collect the Central Gold". It was an exceedingly clever reference of the former Central Power's, Germany and Turkey, and the assorted bounties they had on George Crawley's head. Thus, it was the inside joke, which had been a real hit in the ballrooms of London, that if you want to earn an easy and immense fortune …

Go kill George Crawley.

And sure enough, Mr. and Mrs. Bates, Mr. Barrow, Lord Sinderby, and even Mrs. Hughes heard of half a dozen plots hatched in servant halls, pubs, and clubs around London about doing just that. Whither they were poor blokes trying to find a way out of the Depression, titled peers that belong to the British Union of Fascists that were loyal to Hitler, or Countesses and Duchesses in drawing rooms hatching schemes. It seemed that there was no end to the court intrigue to place Sybbie as the future Countess of Grantham and their daughter-in-law. The girl was the talk of the ballroom, and the plans to collect Nazi and Ottoman gold, as well as a beautiful Countess were the whispered talk in the shadowy corners of the highest government offices.

By a week of this, Sybbie was on edge. This wasn't what she had ever wanted. She wanted to go on a carriage ride with her Granny, to wear a white gown with a feather in her hair. She wanted to be presented to a king, and afterward to share something truly special with her Granny and Donk. But now all she heard was how everyone wanted to marry her, wanted her mama and daddy's money, how they hoped that George, her best friend in the whole world, would die. Some old women even assured her in private to not worry, that it was going to happen eventually, as if she was hoping he'd die too. So when Sybbie found out that George had sent her a letter, and that it had been opened, she freaked out. What if someone had snuck in her room during their big dinners? What if they read where George was and hired someone to ambush him? But when she found out that it was Marigold, she let out a week of stress and raw nerves out on the ballerina.

Sybbie understood that her Donk was just sad and lost, and he wanted to feel secure, wanted to trust his life's work to the girl he loved most in the world. But in naming that girl second in line, it unleashed a flood gate of unwanted attention and no uncertain amount of danger for George. In fact, in that time since it came out, though he never said anything to protect his Sybbie from distress, George Crawley would have escaped a few British dungeons. He had been put there by opportunist Peers in exile, playing the Bounty Hunter to win the gambit's fortune of Persian and Nazi Gold, an Automobile fortune, the castle of Downton Abbey, and a stunning wife in Lady Sybil for their sons. By the start of the war, George had gone by Isobel's maiden name in order to protect himself from a flood of adventurers, Bounty Hunters, and hired assassins from Germany, Turkey, Persia, and even England.

It was only when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister that the Aristocracy halted their head hunting, as he declared that any British citizen caught trying to plot to collect the Wolf's Head would be considered a traitor and punishable by firing squad. Some seventy plus years later, superfluous to George Crawley's fate, it is still a Capital Offense to turn in or slay the Master of Downton Abbey for a foreign national's money.

But by a week of unrelenting attention, Sybbie couldn't take it anymore. How could Mama be so disappointing? How could anyone think this was what she wanted out of life? To talk non-stop of dresses, to hear what Mrs. Tiddy-Winkle across the ballroom did with Mr. So-and-so when Mr. Tiddy-Winkle went to visit his niece in her changing room. Or what Consuelo Vanderbilt's granddaughter was wearing and how she didn't carry the same prestige as her grandmamma, or how Sybbie just did it so much better than any other American Heiress's granddaughters. With all her soul she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, "Who the hell cares?!" to the whole party. She liked fashion, she liked looking pretty, she loved shopping with her aunts. But she couldn't imagine her life becoming this, living life like her Granny or Mama. If there was anything that she had learned from the times chasing George across America and hearing him talk, she knew what was out there. It was adventure, mystery, and life. There was such life out there, beyond the ball and tea rooms. The world wasn't Downton. There was more, such grand promise out there. It was something that no one seemed to understand in her life, no one but George who had lived through the many great truths that everyone else in her life didn't even know had questions.

And by the Easter season of her eighteenth birthday Sybbie wanted so much more. She didn't want to be a sleek and cold fashionesta like her mama. To write about fantasy worlds of a young heroine like her Aunt Edith. Or live for garden, house, and society parties like her Aunt Rose. She didn't even want to be some feminist trailblazer like her mother. No, Sybbie simply wanted to see what was out there, to look upon something with her own eyes and know there was more to life than what these people considered it to be. To stand on the brink of danger, to see the sunset over some provincial coastline and see it rise over the desolation of a deep and ancient desert. She wanted to take and earn which could not be given by a loving family in a fairy tale castle. She wanted something of her own, her own experiences out in the world.

On the day of the presentations, on the day of the girl's ball, it was really the only day of peace. Every other society hack in the city had gone back to their homes to get dressed and settled for the ball tonight. While in the Crawley London house it was an emotional affair. Lady Grantham couldn't stop kissing Sybbie, hugging her, holding her hand. When she walked out in her white gown, Cora cried, saying that her baby was just too beautiful for words. Lady Grantham had presented every one of her daughters. And now, Sybbie would be last of her children. Edith had Marigold out of wedlock, and her father was not a Lord. Rose would someday present Rachel. There were no other Ladies left in the Crawley family to be presented. But Mary, even as the ice queen of British Society, looked emotional upon saying that the Crawley's had saved their best for last.

When Lady Grantham, in her blue gown, presented her Granddaughter to the King, Robert never looked prouder. The Princess Elizabeth strode forward and whispered something into her father's ear. When the King processed it, he stammered for a moment that he had heard a lot about Sybbie recently. For a moment both Lord and Lady Grantham had been worried that he would comment on an incident that happened a couple years past when both Royal Princesses had come to dine and stay at Downton Abbey.

In ignorance of the company, George walked up from Crawley House to Downton to take a book from the library when he bumped into the eldest. After a few choice and shameful word volleys from Heir to Heiress, George was walking away when the Princess's guard challenged the boy. He told the mysterious, rugged, young man with black curls in a ponytail and leather jacket that it was no way to talk to a future queen. Smirking, ever wearing his Catholic conformation in New York as a badge to spite his grandfather, George proclaimed that Elizabeth was not his queen. Revealing himself to be the heir of Downton, he exclaimed loudly that in the future, "Downton Abbey would recognize no King but the true King and his name is Stuart!" Sybbie gave a playful rebel cry in Gaelic from above the gallery while George departed with his fist raised in the air, leaving the royal party in shock. In casual greeting, he energetically pounded on the shoulder of Mr. Carson, who looked like he was going to have a heart attack. And he clapped a hand on his Uncle Tom's arm in passing with an arrogant, rebel's, smirk.

The Irishman couldn't help but smile in affinity at the boy's face to face, in person, belligerence toward the monarchy. They had already blamed him and Sybbie for George's Catholic confirmation, not buying that anyone was 'that big a fan of the University of Notre Dame's "Football" team'. And there was no doubt the only father figure in the boy's life would be accused of indulging these rebel tendencies. But he knew, like most downstairs, that the rebel's arrogance, between Mary and Sybil in his blood, came purely from genetics.

Luckily, however, the King did not make mention of the now pair of Catholic, seemingly Jacobite, rebels that Robert Crawley had now installed as the future of the County Grantham. Instead he stammered about the jockeying that was the talk of London of "wedding such a pretty thing." And that surely old Robert would be up to his neck in negotiations for her hand. He then bantered playfully with Lady Grantham of if she'd be able to wrangle him an invite to "The Deb Ball of the Century" that would be happening tonight at the Crawley London house. To this, Sybbie smirked a smirk that made her grandparents uneasy. Her reply to the King was that he wouldn't want to miss it for the world.

At the gathering afterward, Robert hugged and kissed his girl, not caring who saw him. Both proud grandparents took a picture with her. But both knew their girl long enough, and had known her mother even longer, to know that look in her eye. There was something suspicious about the way the girl, who had been dragging her feet all week, was now the model Lady to all the Courtiers that gathered around her. Lady Gosford, begrudgingly, complimented that the beauty could've passed for the perfect princess that afternoon. It only made Robert and Cora uneasy, because …

They knew Sybbie Branson was anything but a princess.

That night, the Crawley family prepared themselves for the avalanche of guests. Not since Lady Mary's ball had the Grantham's had the hottest ticket in town. Mary and Anna helped Sybbie get ready, and the girl was positively glowing in her evening gown. They had never seen a more beautiful sight and together with Marigold they'd part a crowd like the Red Sea. It would be unfair to all the boys who'd see them descend those stairs, fore they wouldn't even know what to do with themselves in sight of such female perfection.

The debutante ball was in full swing, filled with the most fashionable people, a Lady Mary approved guest list. The King, Queen, the Princesses, and all their retinue came to see the sport, the hunt for Lady Sybil Branson's hand. The food was perfect, the champagne the right balance of bubbly, and the conversation stimulating. It might have been Lady Grantham's finest hour as a hostess. But then the music started and the young men lined up to scratch their name on Sybbie's dance card …

But only the card showed up.

There was no panic, no shock, and no scramble. There were just eyes squeezed shut in feelings of stupidity from Lord and Lady Grantham, as well as Lady Mary. They didn't flinch when Anna and Marigold came downstairs and privately informed all of the family in the kitchen that Ms. Sybbie had fled into the night with her gown, pearls, jewels, and a suitcase filled with her things. Tom found that the tickets to the French Riviera that Mary and he had gotten for her where gone too. On what was supposed to be the most important night of any debutante's life was the night the genius engineer, fled for adventure in the great wide somewhere. In the process she had humiliated the House of Grantham, most of London Society, and a King of England who had reserved the right for the first dance.

For a month the angry family had hatched plans to find the girl and drag her back. Tom and Mary would go to Marseille and give the girl a good talking too. But Tom wasn't wholly keen on punishing his daughter, or even disciplining her. He had no leg to stand on when he was going to dump slop on top of a British General's head as a young man, and her mother had ran off with the family's chauffeur. As the weeks past they all worried, till Edith pointed out that Sybbie, like her mother, was someone who threatened to run away all the time. But they all knew what Sybbie's equivalent to running away actually was. Edith would stake her life on a letter confirming what they already knew. And it was no surprise to those who knew and loved Sybbie best when a crumbled, sun stained, and sandy note arrived for Lady Grantham with one sentence.

 _She's With Me._

 _-George_

For almost an entire year, Tom, Mary, Lord and Lady Grantham had received no letters. Sybbie wrote Marigold, Edith, and Rose, corresponding with the only three people that wouldn't write back with angry demands or letters of disappointment. She never said what she and George were doing, but she did ask Rose and Marigold to buy certain obscure magazines and newspapers to keep them for her. Marigold, betrayed Sybbie's forced promise by showing her family the things Sybbie wanted saved. And that's where they found out that George and Sybbie were racing airplanes in the Colonies.

In an obscure periodical, covering racing, there was a picture of their team. There was a former Indian Sergeant with the Poona Rifles, a scrawny young man in black with a kippah, and a very serious looking African who was tall, muscular, and shirtless but for a red vest. In the center was George in his double breasted leather jacket, aviator goggles, and navy blue scarf fluttering dashingly in the wind. Next to him was Sybbie who was in olive drab pants, tall boots, brown leather gloves, and a white tank top. Behind them was a sleek, aro-dynamic, and streamlined dieselpunk racer straight from the imagination of Norman Bel Geddes. The Indian soldier and the small Jewish youth held a Championship cup on each side, their fists raised in the air in celebration. On the other side of George and Sybbie, the African warrior, with a large scimitar sheathed at his hip, had his arms crossed, dark eyes betraying nothing as he glared. But the most enduring thing to the Crawley's was the look of satisfaction and purpose in the eyes of the two best friends that stood lovingly arm and arm smiling victoriously to the camera.

Slowly a sad little smile touched Lady Mary while she stood by the mantle in the Downton Drawing Room. The walls of gold, white, and aqua shimmered in the candle light that reflected off the large championship trophy for the victors of the "Colonial Cup 1938" that sat showily above the fireplace mantle. Next to the cup was a little golden frame with the original photo taken from the magazine article. At first Lord Grantham would not have these things in his Drawing Room. He didn't want the reminders of his two heirs running off in succession. But Lady Grantham would have none of his excuses. It was Mary who banished George, and it was Sybbie's decision to leave. Cora had nothing to do with it, and if Robert didn't want to see 'her babies' accomplishments, then his Lordship can have his tea facing the windows. So they stayed where Lady Grantham put them for every guest to see every time they entertained.

But one of these objects always caught the woman's eye. On a shining mahogany table, on full display with pride was a trophy of a different kind. It was a large and heavy silver statue of a fierce Bird of Prey, with his wings outspread, and giving a war cry. It's sword like talons lay gripped upon a haloed perch that had the swastika inside with the two letters "SS" in the shape of lightning bolts emblazoned over the Nazi symbol. It once sat on the pinnacle of the staff of a Blutfahne legionary standard of the elite Waffen-SS. It was a special ornament ordained by Hitler himself, and marched in front of the Fuhrer during his famous speech in Munich. It had been the pride of the paramilitary unit of Stormtroopers that were part of an incursion into Jewish lands to plunder an ancient temple. Now it sat as a battle trophy in the Drawing Room of Downton Abbey, captured by a band of Frontier Rangers, Hebrew Militia and Provincial Calvary.

Mary touched the Nazi eagle, remembering that it was Sybbie's most prized possession, the trophy she was most proud of. The girl was allusive in saying how exactly they had captured it. But, little Hugh did let it slip at tea that it had been captured in battle during a cavalry charge against a Nazi gunner position. A mounted George had ripped the regimental standard out of the hand of the evil SS Colonel who had chased him from Spain, and ran the perfect Aryan specimen through the heart with his own saber. However, the small boy excitedly relayed that Sybbie was actually the real hero. She had kept the Nazi's from poisoning a desert reservoir by infiltrating the camp dressed as a belly dancer. But, before he could continue, Sybbie rushed in and had quickly shushed her baby cousin. She saw her family's faces turn red at the image of the silky, scantily clad, girl dancing for a throng of lusty Germans. She then shot Rachel and Marigold a dirty look, which said she was never going to tell them any more stories again on their holidays to Bath.

Neither side claimed there was ever a battle to begin with. The British had never committed any soldiers from the proper Royal Army, and their chief excuse being that Neville Chamberlain was the Prime Minister. While Hitler would never acknowledge not only losing one of his prized eagles, but his best troops being routed by a rag-tag band of volunteers and Jewish olive farmers.

But that night, after ripping the red, white, and black Nazi flag from the staff and tossing it into the flames, George harpooned their prize into the sand near the night fire. With a tired sigh, he flopped down shoulder to shoulder with a still costumed Sybbie, wrapped in his coat and Mexican desert blanket. She had a look of a thousand yards directed into the fire ponderously when George handed her a mug of frothing alcohol. She turned to gaze at him in the silence of the aftermath of a year of getting more than she ever bargained for when she left home. She could've cried, could've shuttered of the danger of the day, or the death around them. But, instead, stupid grins slowly appeared on their faces. With deep breaths that turned to laughter, they both smashed their mugs of ale together with shakes of their heads. Shoulder to shoulder they downed the drink.

In that short time, huddled together with mugs by firelight, they were the heroes of Israel.

" _Here's forty shillings on the drum,  
To those who'll volunteer to come,  
To 'list and fight the Nazi and Arab knave,  
Over the hills and far away._

O'er the hills and o'er the main,  
Through North Africa, Palestine and Spain,  
Captain George commands and we obey,  
Over the hills and far away."

The lightest of smirks touched Lady Mary's lips as she finished the little song that Sybbie used to sing under breath as she cleaned the eagle. It was an old song whose original lyrics she had heard a hundred different times over her life as a daughter of a soldier. But there was something fond and nostalgic about the new lyrics the Frontier Rangers and a Pirate's crew had added. When her girl sang it under breath with that little smile, there was the light of youthful victory to her beauty. The way Sybbie looked, it was the way Rose looked when they talked of her first season, the way Edith had looked on the night that an Opera singer had come to Downton. And it was the way Mary looked when she thought of entering the church for the first time, and seeing Matthew and Tom standing at the altar together.

She used to wonder, after the news of George's action at Dunkirk, why Sybbie was so gung-ho to join the fight, to get into danger. But now, with the jolly little tune on her lips, she realized that maybe air racing was only a part of what George and Sybbie had done out there on the Orient. But whatever the adventure or the fight had been, their Mama came to understand that as much as society teas and dinners might have been her, Edith, and their parent's world. That Championship trophy and picture on the mantle, the captured Nazi Eagle, being admired by a group of guests, was her children's world. And a part of her was happy, found she was thankful, more than ever, that Sybbie had been there with George. Thankful that they had one another for that short time. That in the dark of the night, after a hard day of inescapable death, that there was that little song between them, and a reminder of glories of yesterday shared together.

She listened to her papa, delicately, and helped by Shrimpie filling in detail, tell the somewhat edited version of how one of Hitler's Eagles came to Downton. Since dinner, the intrigue of the guests had them hungered for more stories. The Ladies had pestered Edith in the Drawing Room after dinner, and the men around the table hounded Shrimpie. Everyone wanted more. In a strange way, in the candle light, in the violence of the storms outside, there was a campfire element to it all. It was as if they were all gathered around the fire and were telling stories to one another to pass the night. Mama had always said that things looked better in the morning, but until then, they all wanted their imaginations occupied from whatever was going on out there. And, it seemed, that there was no better tonic than what stories Shrimpie knew of George and Sybbie's time in Palestine and the trophies and trinkets she had brought home that Mama had decorated Downton with.

There was a pleasant smile plastered on Lady Mary's face as she listened. She had heard the odd tale, here and there, of her son's exploits in far off places. But she had facetiously mocked them, called them ridiculous, or point blank denied they ever happened. But for the first time, she had allowed herself to see it, to feel it. To not carry the burden of guilt upon hearing how much she had hurt her child, to a point of him finding himself in these situations. For just once, one night, she allowed herself to feel, as everyone else felt. She allowed herself to be proud of the child she bore, the son that she and Matthew created out of love. And in her pride, she couldn't stop smiling. Of course she knew that they had bred a courageous child, that much was given. But it didn't hurt to hear it proven, without a doubt, every once in a while.

But amongst the praise of the ingenuity and strategic mind of the young adventurer, Lady Annabelle seethed. The accumulation of drink, the bitter jealousy of the proud smile on her cousin's face, and her conditioned hatred for everything that Downton stood for, lit a fire. With the introduction of alcohol, the lit burner grew into a fire bomb. There was such shameful and reckless hatred in her heart. Pushed and embittered by a shrill, ambitious, and unhappy mother, who damned all wholesome joy that she was never allowed to feel. She had tried for years to beat it out of Rose, till she got married and Rose sent here. But, most of all, she hated how much she had been left behind by her Papa. Then, years later, she found him here, at Downton, as if he was one of them along with his precious Rose. A deep distain grew into something ugly and hateful in the candlelight as she watched him tell stories to their fellow guests. He talked about these horrid, uncultured, half-breeds like they were his own grandchildren, his own pride. Yet, he had never even clapped eyes on her children, his grandchildren by blood. It drove her to the blackest of places in a sickened soul. For, in that moment, she hated her father. She hated all of them, all the Crawley's. And worst of all …

She knew very well how this much garnished and 'gallant' story about Sultans, Grail, and Magicians fawned on by everyone … actually ended.

Licking her lips, she looked across from her. "I do love a happy ending, don't you, papa?" There was an audible rancor to her voice that caused the others to be captured by her comment. "I do believe you never did finish the story about the Magician, papa." She smiled the sourest of sweetness.

All the elation, animation, and enthusiasm of the master storyteller seemed to drain away. He stared at his daughter, and with much pride on her face for it, did he not know the vile woman on the couch next to the Duchess and Lady Grantham.

"Mm … yes, you never did finish the story." Lady Mary pointed out with a bit of wholesome, 'golly-gumdrop', enthusiasm.

All the hopeful looks that gleamed on him were like gun barrels of a firing squad to the old man's heart. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn't. Instead he glared helplessly toward his daughter who looked so much like Susan in the moment when she mockingly perked up, ready for her 'dear papa' to tell her favorite part of the story. He guessed he shouldn't be surprised she knew of the incident. His son-in-law was just the kind of prig that would know about something like this.

"Lady Grantham …" He began to protest for their hostess to help him change the subject in warning.

"Come, papa, we're all waiting." Lady Annabelle baited so sweetly.

With all his heart he wanted to shake his head for everyone not to fall for it. Lady Mary looked weary of her Cousin Annabelle's baby doll innocence which used to be her mocking impression of Lady Grantham in private to make Susan laugh. Now she used it as a weapon of sarcasm in the open. But in a night that felt like a parody of all the glorious yesterdays, it was one more blast of the past that ruined the evening.

"What is it, Shrimpie?" Edith, one more time, bit the hook that her cruel cousin had baited.

Shrimpie closed his eyes painfully, knowing that there was no escape now.

A crowd of subjects in a North African desert city stood in shock. On the drawbridge of a desert palace, George Crawley walked forward. Shrimpie Flintshire at his side, and the Sultan behind him, they gathered around the fallen men of a backfired cap and ball pistol. George knelt next to the dying Magician, Yensid Asud-Agahnim. Blood in solidified globs was hemorrhaging from his mouth, his hand amputated and shrapnel of iron in his chest. But, despite his appearance, there was nothing but amusement on his effeminate face. If he had a hat and a hand to tip it to his most worthy opponent, he might have. But instead he found it funny, found it fitting to be beaten by his own trick.

But in his final moments, he made peace with the realization that there was no one who could reach him. He'd not sit and wait till someone could pull off a more perfect illusion, something more daring and fantastical. For a time, maybe forever, would Yensid Asud-Agahnim be known as the greatest magician who had ever lived and would live. But most of all, his dying words were not rancor, but a joy, a pure exhilaration of distilled hatred. He'd not only fooled an Empire, made a Sultan disappear, but for his final trick, he'd make an entire kingdom, and an entire tribe of people disappear. Fore, the magician had already won. His revenge had come a long time ago, and there was nothing, nothing that the Sultan could do about it. His life, his joy, his reason for living, would soon be over.

Then he died, knowing he was, truly, the greatest Magician who had ever lived.

At first it didn't occur to the men present for his final words of what he meant. For a few hours, there was only the taste of victory. The Sultan returned to his kingdom, his palace, returned to his wife. He held his young and lovely daughter in his arms. They released Professor Abramov, the Sultan healed and recuperated his old friend himself. George was hailed a hero. Meanwhile, the Imam had been imprisoned for his rebellion. It would seem that everything pointed to a happy ending …

Even if it had only been for a couple of days.

The duplicity of the normal government officer in North African and Mid-East postings was everlasting. But the worst of all of them was Phillip, the Duke of Crowborough. He had once thought he might have landed a rich heiress when he had come to Downton Abbey in the spring of 1912. But his hopes of making Lady Mary Duchess ended at the very dinner table where she still sat that night. A Great War, the loss of an eye, and the fall of his father's estate, had exiled him to the desolate, barbaric, wastelands of the Sahara. Always in pursuit of the ever elusive fortune that would bring the Duke back to prominence. He found it by spying Nazi transmissions being intercepted by the MI-6 Field Office in Cairo. His name was George Crawley, the son of his beautiful, rich, Duchess that never was meant to be. The two bounties was enough to buy back his reputation, but by gaining and selling off the trinket the Nazis and young man were racing each other for would triple the money he'd get by killing the last male heir of the House of Grantham.

His rank in society and within his forced career in the army had him taking command of the battalion of the 10th Poona Rifles and 82nd New Zealand Afoot that moved into the desert kingdom. He immediately arrested George on sight. Despite the young man's irreplaceable involvement of restoring British interest in the province, he was imprisoned in the deepest and darkest dungeons below the city's ancient masque. The Sultan protested the action as did Shrimpie. But the Major General was the military authority in the province and George Crawley was an English Citizen and subject to British jurisdiction.

"On what charges?!" Lady Mary said in outrage.

Shrimpie turned to Lady Edith for a moment. "I …" He turned back to the empty white and gold space he was keeping his trouble eyes on. "I dare not say in this company tonight." He insisted. "Suffice to say George was arrested …" But before he could continue Annabelle broke in.

"Yes, arrested on the charge of probable manslaughter for the legal responsibility of the brutal beating of the Marquess of Hexham by the Pinkerton in New York City …" She added with delicious intrigue. She lifted her wine to her lips, pausing for only a moment. "Mm, Edith, darling, you wouldn't happen to know anything about that?" She sipped her wine.

There was near tears in Bertie's wife's was in shock. "That's preposterous!" She shook her head, eyes wide in panic as if all of this was unfolding in front of them. "Those charges were never filed!" She argued. "I … I never signed any charges!" She argued to the shocked looks on her family's faces that were directed right at her, as if she had something to do with this outrage.

"No? But in the eyes of British law he was responsible for the unfortunate incident."

"He was being chased by horrible mercenary thugs!"

"Who were deputized as legal law enforcement and were in the middle of their duty to apprehend a dangerous criminal, darling."

"He was twelve years old!" Edith shouted in shocked outrage of the insinuation.

"Quite impressive, when my boy was twelve, he was playing in the gardens. Not shooting police officers off their horses, or starting gun fights on Fifth Avenue." She sipped her wine.

"They weren't police officers!" Edith uncharacteristically snarled.

Never had the classiest woman in the aristocracy looked so dangerous, so ready to snap. She was vengeful and unrepentant to learn that many Pinkertons had lost their lives to young George's marksmanship that night and for weeks after. It brought her comfort, especially, after what they had done to her husband.

"Annabelle, that's quite enough!" Shrimpie snapped with a fatherly authority. "Between a Turkish bounty and a Nazi death mark, there was enough gold offered to bring up all sorts of trumped up charges against Captain Crawley from people like you! And what is it all for, Lady Sybil's beauty and money, this castle?" He accused, in his outrage, not only his daughter, but the entire room of Peers.

Though, he was not talking to Robert in the slightest. The man, never the less, felt small in that moment.

Bitter and treasure obsessed Lord Crowborough had only gold and wealth on the mind while the Kingdom returned to normal. Not wanting to be bothered by provincial politics. He was swayed by secret Nazi cables, negotiating the price for 'The Grail of Prague' and 'The Crusader' in the dungeons. The Duke restored the Grand Imam as religious leader of the Kingdom. At first, the vain fool hadn't realized what he had done, or what great evil of the Magician's revenge that followed. Meanwhile, while his men beat up George, Professor Asimov, and the rest of the Jewish elders in interrogation for the whereabouts of the Grail, the Imam carried out Agahnim's terrible revenge. Amidst the peaceful transition of the true sultan and his family back to power, their happiness was short lived when the Grand Imam accused the Princess of the grave sin of adultery.

It was her shameful secret that she had tried to keep from her father and mother. It was a torment that she dealt with every day, every hour. For much of the year of imprisonment, Agahnim had come to her bedchamber and forced himself upon her. He refused to take her to wife, amusing himself to keep her, a princess, as his pleasure slave. His sickness of the mind and depravity's stink fumigated every inch of her soul. She was made different, damaged, and tarnished in the mirror where she saw, daily, the only person who knew her secret shame. There had been so many times she had wished to tell someone, to relieve this great burden of endless trauma on her broken heart. But she couldn't bear the way it might have destroyed her parents, her mentor the professor, and all the people she loved. Never once did she think of herself in her suffering. Her medicine would be having her Papa back, being able to see her mother again. To have her family back, with their arms around her, was what she thought would heal her.

But now, her shame, her awful secret, was used to damn her.

At first, despite the torment of the parents of the girl, the Sultan and Sultana did not see it as a public or State matter. But just as the people of the kingdom would not allow Agahnim to dismiss George's challenge to the duel, they would not allow the Sultan or his Anglo wife to dismiss the word of The Prophet that they swore to uphold from their throne. Helpless and broken, they attended the Sharia Court held at the great masque on the other side of the city where George was imprisoned. In the Kingdom, in the laws of men, the Sultan was ruler of all. But in the masque, were Allah was king, the Imam ruled. And his ruling was that the Princess had sinned, and sinned gravely.

And her punishment was death.

A deep, deep, sadness fell over the Drawing Room that stole all noise from the crowd. "But …" Lady Edith was glassy eyed. "But, she was raped." She had said it so softly, so heart-brokenly, that it was only heard due to the deathly quiet of the room.

"In Islamic Law …" Shrimpie looked physically pained, having to relive it all again. "In a Sharia Court, a woman must have four male witnesses to confirm that a rape occurred." He explained with a deep dejected look on his face as if he could see right in front of him the crying girl with golden hair pleading for her 'daddy' to do something as the clerics dragged her away to the dungeons to accompany George and the professor.

"Did, did no one … at all?" Tom asked quietly.

"Of course …" Lord Flintshire nodded his head slowly. "Plenty of men came forward and sided with the Princess, myself included." He replied. "But I was Christian, and the rest of them were Jewish. Our word meant nothing in their law. And no Muslim man, whether he had been a palace servant or a marketer, dared challenge their most important holy man within his own fiefdom." He covered his mouth to hide the tremble of his jaw in sadness and anger in memory of such a black day.

They had put it to the Sultan as to what death awaited his once pure, perfect, desert rose. With his own blade he would be allowed to behead his daughter in retribution for the honor of his house she had stained. Or, if he so chose, the spiritual elders would take her to the city square and stone her to death for such a grievous crime, the worst that a woman could commit. Powerless and unable to answer, the Sultan turned his back in defeat. Instead, his admiration turned to hatred for George Crawley, for Matthew Crawley. They had returned him home, saved him on the Somme that horrible afternoon so that he might live to see this day. All he was reported to have said was a curse upon the Crawley men.

It would be death by stoning.

In the dungeons, Crowborough grew tired of George's silence. He and his men had beaten the young man, made sure it had been several days since he had last eaten anything. But George would still not talk of the Grail or why he sought it. The Duke, however, was a man of science when it came to things such as this. The human conscious needed pressure, needed stakes beyond pain, to give something up. He made the Imam hold the princess longer, made her share a cell with George, let them get to know each other. They were two imprisoned kids, finding comfort in one another in the cold darkness of their moldy hell. Then he made the young adventurer a deal. He'd free the Princess. He'd even give the lovely and exotic girl to him so that Downton might have a real princess as the queen of the county someday. All George had to do was tell him who knew where the Grail was. But the young man, even when faced with the girl to watch, refused to surrender. He knew that Crowborough would just kill both of them when he got what he wanted. The Duke, a life of disappointment breeding a cruelty within his blackened heart, dragged the starving teenage hero to the town square for the stoning to see what his silence had bought.

A shaken and deeply sorrowful Shrimpie turned to find that the entire party seemed to carry the weight of the story upon them. They all were shocked and found themselves reeling. It had been such a fantastic and sparling adventure at dinner. It seemed hard to come to terms that it had ended so horridly awful for all the characters involved. They thought they were getting some sort of fairy story, a tale from a dime novel, or from a popular magazine. Those stories didn't end this way. Good always won. There was no bitter pill to swallow of the hero escaping danger to ever be haunted and tormented by the adventure that had been marked by such loss and tragedy. The gallant Knight of the Roundtable finally obtaining his sought after prize, to gaze over the Holy Grail and come to realize that it was not worth the price. That he'd send it to a place where he thought he'd never return, knowing he would never have to see it again and be reminded of the horrible things that happened.

But the only person who didn't flinch was Lady Edith. She had learned long ago, from the compatriots that shared in George's journeys, one bitter truth. Jonah Robinson said it best one quiet night after dinner when she asked him to tell her about George. _"Miss Edith, there ain't a story worth telling that's ever worth finishing. Cause, there ain't any story worth telling that was memorable, because, something good happened."_ And he was right. Marigold, Lady Edith, and Sybbie knew that all the things that Edith wrote into the issues of 'The Sketch' were only half of the truth. When, in reality, all of George's long years of high adventure, rarely did anything ever good happen for anyone. The lost children of a generation, who grew up traveling railroads and journeying through a Depression stricken land, knew that the best stories started with "I had Breakfast" and ended with "I ate dinner and went to sleep in a bed". Anything else was simply 'the struggle' that every kid went through and only rich folk across an ocean found amusing.

"What did George do?"

For one last time JJ Bates, the footman, broke in as the story abruptly ended. For a long moment Shrimpie stared at the young Mr. Bates. He was a brave lad, a good lad, and Shrimpie liked him since the first time he saw him. When he looked up, he saw the young man standing next to him, coffee pot in hand. He saw that he was still young enough, innocent enough, and good enough to have a single tear in his eye for a girl he never met and never would. Not in so many years had the Marquess of Flintshire's heart been filled with so much dark helplessness in the good of humanity. But the old man, for all the darkness, had hope at what stood before him. Shrimpie had never looked more paternal, or grateful to see such goodness in the gloom of this night and in his heart.

He placed a hand on the young footman's shoulder. "It's a story for another time, my lad." He smirked brokenly. "When you're much, much, older …" His sorrowful complexion trebled his voice as he swallowed emotionally. With a clear of his throat he patted the young man's shoulder with grandfatherly fondness.

"As if we don't know …" Lady Gosford snorted with distain at her father's attempts to cover-up what happened. The rest of the room turned with shock and outrage toward the Countess who had been so gleeful for them all to hear the horrid story.

A look of anger was rushing over Tom as he gritted his teeth. He didn't know exactly what this woman did or didn't know. But he didn't care for her tone and he had grown thin of patience. He was not George's father, and had met nothing but resistance and cutting rebuke anytime he had tried to take some of the burden. But he cared deeply for the boy. He remembered Matthew. He remembered how he did his best, always, even when Tom was just a chauffeur paling around with Sybil as they dreamed of a better world together, to include him. He was his friend, his partner, and he swore he'd always look out for his boy. But it got more personal as George got older, especially, when he had seen him for the first time there at that villainous hive of a cantina on the Mexican Border. He had never dreamed, never fathomed, how much he could look like Sybil. How much he acted like her when he came at and battled Robert in the subsequent year of his return. It was as if he was being coached, being led by her invisible hand. That in those moments, somehow, this lost love was there again. And for that, Tom Branson would always defend the boy. He'd always have a special place for him in his reminder of the woman he loved forever and the best friend, a brother, gone too soon.

"Will you kindly shut your mouth?!" It was Lord Flintshire who snarled with eyes that only saw red. "You can't possibly know what you're talking about!" He venomously shot at his own daughter.

But Annabelle simply chuckled to herself drolly. "Oh, Papa …" She tossed her hair back. "This is, of course, the same George Crawley whose fury was so famous at the Cairo Museum? But far be it from me to tell our fellow guests about it. Think of that poor old Ottoman Princess in Tehran who had to live through her only child killed in Mary's bed, only to see how that same woman's mad cur butchered her grandson like he was an animal …" She chuckled to herself as she lounged backward, kicking her crossed over leg.

When Sybbie first returned from Palestine, she looked so different than when she left. She looked more mature, wiser, and very haunted. The truth was that no one was expecting to see Sybbie for a very long time. She had found her passion, living her dreams. But it surprised everyone when she wrote that she was coming home. And it was no wonder why when they met her at South Hampton. Something had happened over there, something that had shaken Sybbie badly. The girl had saw something, had gone through an ordeal that harrowed her. She never spoke of it, but when there was even a whiff of blame leveled at George, she was quick to anger in his defense. But whatever had happened, she swore she'd take it to her grave.

But the secret lasted only so long.

The old Ottoman Princess, the mother of Kamal Pamuk, the grandmother of Alemdar Pamuk, sent an ancient crafted chest to the Grantham family. Inside was a bed of rose peddles burying a Labrador puppy baring the Grantham coat of arms on his collar. The family was shocked and horrified to find that the puppy was dead, strangled to death by piano wire. The sight incensed Robert, while Tom recovered a letter from the collar in which the old witch swore that the brutal slaughter of her grandson at the hands of George Crawley would not go unanswered. She swore that Lady Mary and all of her children, and their children's children would suffer as she forever cursed the very stones of Downton Abbey.

Already shaken by the sight of his favorite breed of dog, sent to his family, sent to him, in such a manner, Robert nearly lost himself upon hearing Sybbie tell them what happened. They all fawned over the girl, asking if Pamuk had hurt her, if he had … 'touched her' when they learned that she had been kidnapped. But she replied honestly, that George had rescued her in time before anything happened. She was quick in wanting to make it clear that George was a hero, that he was her hero, and that was all she'd give them.

But, privately, at night, she relived the nightmare of the brutal duel between the two figures dancing in the half-light of the closed Cairo Museum, their larger than life shadows cast over the vulnerable girl and wall of ancient hieroglyphics. Sybbie was ashamed of leaving a still weakened and wounded George in Alexandra. The young man still needed Captain Alcazar Al-Azeem's shoulder, but he still came to see her off to France. But their parting was sorrowful and filled with shame on both sides. George was filled with a unbearable guilt that she saw him at his worst, as something twisted and subhuman in a blood rage. Sybbie, ashamed that she was frightened of the person she loved most, frightened of the animal that showed itself when he saw her trussed up, in a _Worth Ballgown_.

It was as if the costume her captor forced her to wear was plotted. It was as if he were forcing George to relive something horrifying from his past, purposefully. But it was the last mistake that the Frenchman would ever make. It was the way Sybbie was dressed, the way they had her on a ceremonial bed, Pamuk thought that it would affect George negatively … and he was right. The sight of the old sin of twelve year old boy awakened some deep darkness within her hero's soul in memory of the last time he saw someone he loved like that. A demon as hateful and black as hell itself exploded from dark blue eyes. And when that happened, Alemdar Pamuk, the bastard son of the Princess of Monaco, came to wish he was never born. For months, a year later, Sybbie still could not unsee the savagery, the blackest of rage, which had overcame George at the sight of what they had put on her. Then, it was no longer a fight to settle a blood feud started by lust for a virgin daughter of an Earl … it was murder.

When she closed her eyes she could still hear the horror, the madness, of the brutality George dispatched Alemdar Pamuk with in the obscured darkness of a shadowed corner. She could still hear the rage filled grunts, growls, and roars as he beat the evil man out of sight. The noises persisted till the monster, raised, and brainwashed by a grandmother to do nothing but avenge his mother's rapist's death in a Grand English Estate in 1913 was nothing but bloody sinew on the golden sarcophaguses of ancient kings.

It took a month back at Downton. Back to the endless parade of house and garden parties, back to the never ending proposals and jockeying for her love, before Sybbie realized that she had made a mistake. But she couldn't face George, couldn't look him in the eye, knowing that there was a time that she was afraid of him. She couldn't cope with running back home to Donk and Granny's arms, abandoning him and their friends back in Alexandretta. So she remained, throwing herself into work, into tinkering with her father and mama's engines, and demanding that George and her trophies from their adventures be on full display in the drawing room. There she may look at them wistfully, remembering the best times of her life, before she believed she turned coward.

Lady Annabelle McCordle looked at Mary and Edith standing together. "Tell me, Cousin Mary, is it true what the Arabs say? Did Captain Crawley really eat Alemdar Pamuk's heart? I guess he spent too much time with those red savages in the "Wild West", huh? Or, was it strictly a 'New York type incident', eh, Edith? If so I'd very much hope, for some of our **older** female guest's sake, that Captain Crawley is dead." She chuckled. "I would surly hate to be one of them when he catches them with Rose in their bed tonight … am right, Lady Brookbottom?" She toasted an old woman sitting next to Lady Grantham. The elderly woman looked away in blushed shock and embarrassment at reviving an ugly rumor she spent most of her life trying to hide.

"Be quiet this instant!" Lord Grantham had more than enough. He shot out of his seat, his face crimson in rage.

But the short sighted woman was having the time of her life. She was finally, drunkenly, unloading all of her frustration and ingrained hatred of all of them. "There it is …" She 'tsked' at Lord Grantham condescendingly. "There is the legendary Grantham temper that you so ably passed onto poor dead Sybil and Captain Crawley. It's the temper that has given the Arabs and poor Princess Pamuk nightmares." She tilted her head. "You know, the Colonial pilots and the papers called your grandson "The Comet" when he was a racer. But the Arabs … oh …" She chuckled in delicious contempt. "The Arabs had a different name for him. They called him, ah, what was it …? Oh, 'Alrrajul Alqatil' "The Man Slayer" isn't that right, Papa?" She asked a silent Lord Flintshire who refused to meet her gaze at the question. Knowing, shamefully, that after North Africa George would carry a special hatred for Muslim Holy Men till his dying day. "In fact they used to call both Captain Crawley and Leftenant Branson "The Crusaders" when they were together. Not that they were part of a cause, mind you. But, because, of the carnage their Rangers left behind. It reminded the Muslims of the Crusades. What a lovely pair you both raised." She toasted Lady Grantham and Tom in accusation against the children.

"I want you to leave this instant!" Robert roared, Cora restraining him.

But Lady Annabelle McCordle, Countess of Gosford, looked like evil incarnate in her unbridled glee. She looked teasingly shocked at the shortening restraint that Robert was showing. "Why so angry, Uncle Robert, I certainly don't understand?" Her voice was cutesy and girlish, in clear mocking of Lady Grantham. "This must be a banner day for you all? Captain George Crawley, the shame of House Grantham, finally did something right for a change. He saved our lives, and then had the decency to kick off so that his favorite old Uncle Winston can tick off all of those _little_ incidents from his record so the propaganda artists at 'The Sketch' can give him a big send off." She got up and began walking tipsily to the door. "Turn quite the profit for that exclusive, eh, Edith Darling?" She snickered mockingly, her voice taking the shrillness of Susan.

"I mean, Lady Sybil doesn't have much in refinement and it'll be hard to wash off that blood on her hands. But the girl's got the looks and the money. And after all, isn't that what anyone is really after?" She asked rhetorically as she stumbled past the shocked crowd talking playfully and conversationally insolate. "Come now, Uncle Robert, Aunt Cora, let the parade of suitors come honor you. Let them kiss you and the Chauffeur's ass. Show them around your grand house, brag about your ancient pageantry, and talk of your mad cur like he was some kind of hero." She stopped at the door where Carson stood sentry. No one was sure if his hand was shaking due to disease or deep fury.

"I swear you Grantham's have all the luck. It seems that every time a disappointment in the family pops up, they die fairly quickly. First was back alley Sybil, then it was the middle class pretender, the race car driver, Rosie's Kike, and now … and for your final trick, and not too soon might I add …" She tossed back her drink before she finished. She jammed it rudely in Mr. Carson's shaking hand.

"The rabid half-breed!"

With a gleeful laugh, finding her cousin's fall to nothing, delectable, Lady Gosford stumbled out of the Downton drawing room.

Robert looked like he was about to have a heart attack, and Lady Grantham looked so uncharacteristically furious that had she not been worried for her husband's health, she might have set him loose. But, surprisingly, it was Lady Mary who began striding across the room after her cousin. No one had ever seen Mary Crawley so riled up, so emotionally compromised. The pale beauty looked as if she could murder, and she just might.

No one, **no one** , got away with talking about her children like that. George had been mocked constantly behind his back for eleven years, even by Mary's own friends. But she never stood for it, even if she might have agreed. It was something that her Granny had beaten into her granddaughters' heads. They might have their troubles with one another, but no one must ever besmirch the family from outside. It had been why Mary was considered a baffling contrarian when she'd endlessly mock Edith. Yet, in the same breath, belittle the person who tried to join in her jests.

But tonight was not a night in which Mary would simply discipline a rival with cutting savagery of an icicle bladed wit. Not when it came to her children, her son, her daughter, who had suffered greatly today. No one could ever accuse Lady Mary of being a creature of passion, of impulse. But when it came to George and Sybbie, when it came to defending them, she followed her impulses with clenched fists covered in silky elbow gloves. Her curtain of long and sleek peekaboo ringlets fell over her eye as she stormed to the door. She wasn't sure what she was gonna do when she reached Annabelle, but it was certainly something very unladylike.

However, before she reached the door knob, Tom grasped her milk white bicep. Then she ran headlong into Mr. Carson's chest. The two of three most important men in her life restrained her before she could do something stupid.

"No, not now, M'lady. Nothing too hasty, I think." Carson was ever the soul of propriety in the ease of his deep bass voice that trembled her mind with comfort and restraint.

"No, Mary, let her go, let that …, let her go." Tom caught himself before saying something undignified. He breathed heavily in self-policing, before unleashing a sigh like smoke from a brushfire within. His big Irish hands held his best friend in check gently.

Mary's eyes were sharp, like bloody knives that still had some steel left dry to be wetted. But as she cast her gaze around, there was a clench of control that tightened her chest. Their guests looked shocked and awkward standing and sitting in the drawing room. They cradled their teacups of coffee and cocktail glasses', avoiding one other's glances. It was as if they had been shell shocked by an explosion. A one two punch of Lady Gosford's social suicide and the horrible ending to such a magnificent story of adventure, had paralyzed the guests. It was such a rarity to see someone so completely meltdown like Annabelle Gosford had. If the woman had painted a thin mustache over her lip, pinned a swastika to her breast, and sung the Nazi anthem, it would match the level of dumbfounded disbelief that fell over their guests. Meanwhile, her papa was breathing heavily, a fist clenched under his nose, while Mama and Edith were calming him.

Turning to Tom and Carson, all Mary could do was give a stiff nod with clenched teeth. The damaged mood of the evening could only get worse if Mary had gone to toss Annabelle down the two flights of their grand staircase. Slowly she was released by her restrainers. She rested her hands on Carson's chest, letting his calm breaths pace her own heart, while Tom rubbed his hand on her supple bareback comfortingly. When the moments passed, following the coached nods of Carson, the man finally opened the door.

"A few moments, I think, M'Lady?" He offered her a chance to step outside. She might have seen this as a chance to go after Annabelle, but it never truly entered her mind as an option. When Carson looked at her with such trust in his eyes, it wasn't in her to betray the old man's standards.

"Thank you, Carson …" She breathed, walking out the door. Tom was about to follow when Mary turned to stop him. "Just a few moments, that's all." She asked politely, calmly. For a moment the Irishman was suspicious, but in the end trust won out. He slowly nodded in understanding and allowed her to walk into the dim lobby of Downton.

Her eyes were drawn to the strange shapes and shadows that glided and flickered in a grand room that she knew like the back of her hand. But for some reason, in the night, in the dim light consumed in darkness of the wee hours of the morning, she felt like she didn't recognize the house at all. It was as if it had become something else entirely. For a moment, in the quiet between storm bands, she felt like a cursed princess trapped in a horrid gothic castle filled with ghosts, vine wrapped stone, and portraits whose eyes followed too closely wherever you stepped. Long had the magic and majesty of the Downton Abbey of her childhood fled from this joyless collection of dusty hereditary sundries, worn furniture, and cobweb wrapped light fixtures.

But a chill went up her spine when she heard a strange noise echoing close to her. With a startle she whirled behind her, the incident with Matthew's … no, the wind, the wind at dinner was fresh on her mind. There she saw an end table mounted by a candelabrum. On it was a tray of crystal decanters and a china coffee pot. In front of the lavished table a slim and short shadow was hunched over. The familiar female figure was shaking, covering her mouth and nose with her hand. Lady Mary suddenly realized that the noise she was hearing was the sound of muffled weeping. There was no reason to be coy in ignoring or even addressing it gradually, especially, when she knew exactly who the shadow was.

"Anna …?"

Mary quickly walked over to her lady's maid and close friend. "Oh, Anna, whatever is the matter?!" She asked in concern. If anyone had heard her, they might not have recognized the tone in the usual ice queen's voice. But when she was alone with Anna Bates, she assumed her truest form.

Anna looked back for a moment, then, quickly tried to clear her eyes turning back to the tray. "Oh, M'Lady … I didn't see you." She sniffled hard.

"Obviously not." Mary confirmed huskily, worried eyes searching through shadow as she reached the woman's side. There was a long moment of silence between the two. The bombshell placed a silky glove on the black satin covered back of the maid. Quietly she waited for her maid to tell her what happened.

"Anna …?" She pressed quietly.

"I'm sorry, M'Lady." She sniffed, shaking her head. Wiping her hands on her apron, she moved to pick up the tray to take downstairs. But Mary quickly put her hand down on it, stopping her.

"What's happened?" For a second she was afraid. Tonight was not a night to stumble upon someone crying alone, especially when so many things, so many important things, were left in the air.

In the service of Lady Mary since before Anna was even considered a teenager, put the maid on the same wavelength as her mistress. Suddenly she realized what it must have looked like. A woman waiting on any sort of scraps of information on her missing son, somewhere out there in the storms, then, to come in and see the wife of one of the searchers crying. She quickly shook her head to comfort Mary.

"It's not, it's not that, M'Lady. I mean, I've been praying every chance I have tonight." She assured her. "But it's not Master George, at least, not in that way …" She sniffled realizing that she wasn't making any sense. "It's nothing M'Lady, I'm just being silly." She smiled brokenly, once again trying to take the tray.

But Mary insisted, holding it down on the table. "Anna, please … what is it?" She asked with sincerity of compassion. The glamorous lady of high birth wasn't asking as a mistress, she was asking as Anna's friend, her close friend.

The woman bit her lip, rubbing her hands on her apron again, as if they were dirty, as if she was dirty. She felt soiled, unclean, and tarnished, unable to clean the dirt from her. Seeing the tick, Mary grasped her maid's hands and held them. But Mrs. Bates shook her head, sniffling, new tears forming. In the candle light she looked horribly tormented as she was once, in their youth.

"I … I keep thinking of that poor girl in Lord Flintshire's story, about how …" She trailed off. "How she must have felt, knowing what that monster done to her. How she was punished for it, treated as if it was somehow … her fault." She sniffled.

Mary suddenly knew what was going through Anna's mind. But she was hesitant to speak of it, not wanting to hurt her. "This is, because, of the incident with Mr. …" She trailed off.

Anna looked up in anticipation, bracing herself for a name being spoken that had been locked away for so long now. "Green, Mr. Green …" She squeezed her eyes shut in anger, shame, and fear that overcame her at the very implication of the name. "Yes, M'Lady … in that … in that I …" She seemed unable to think, unable to process her mind, when all she saw and felt was that night coming back again.

"You knew how she felt …" Mary nodded, bracing her hands tighter.

The maid reclaimed a stiff upper lip. "He only done it once. But that poor girl, she lived through it so many more times, every night …" She denied victimhood to herself in light of comparison.

Shaking her head, her friend looked sympathetic. "It's not a competition, Anna. What he did to you once is as worse as if he had done it to you a hundred times. You feel how you feel." She nodded encouragingly.

New tears were falling down the maids face. "I just, I think what happened to me when Mr. Green died, how they locked me up, how I could've been there forever. And, it's just, what happened to her, that poor girl … How I ended up with a life I never dreamed of, and that princess, her whole life ahead of her, how they …" She sniffed. "It's silly, but I keep thinking, how she ain't gonna ever have a chance to move past it, that she never had a life, a chance to make one that doesn't revolve around what had been done to her!" She broke for a second.

Quickly, Mary took Anna in her arms as she quietly sobbed onto her exposed, bare, shoulders. "Hush now … You have a life, a husband who loves you, children. You have two good, perfect, children. You fought too hard to move past this, to have this life. You've earned it, all of it, this gift. Don't blink, Anna. For god's sake, please, don't blink!" She begged of her friend with a stern kindness as she rubbed her back.

All she could think of was a hospital room. She remembered a squirming babe, so brave, so good, and safe in her arms. Meanwhile, the love of her life held her steady when she thought she'd faint from the swell of love that overwhelmed everything in her universe. Then she blinked, and he was gone, taken by a roadside tree.

They both were.

After a beat they broke apart. "Thank you, M'Lady … I know." She sniffed. "I know." She nodded.

"Plus …" Mary seemed misty eyed. "That would never have happened to you." She smiled confidently. "I wouldn't have allowed it." There was an almost royal arrogance of an empress that was reassuring between the two friends in the dim light. They both smirked despite the salty liquids between them.

"Momma? I mean mother … Mrs. Bates?!"

JJ Bates had come through the drawing room door, holding an empty pot of coffee. He had expected to find Anna alone with a fresh pot, only to find Lady Mary there with her. Half out of formality as a second footman, and mostly out of embarrassment of being fifteen years old and still calling his mother 'Momma', he changed his tone. But when he saw that Anna was emotional, tears in her eyes, the professionalism dissolved.

"What's going on?!" He was alarmed, placing the empty pot on the table. "What's happened?!" He asked.

To see his handsome, young, face in the candlelight, one might have thought Anna Bates had seen an angel. There was a lilt of sorrowful pleasure to Mary to see her friend's burdens relieved in the sight of her child. Everything Mr. Green had ever done to her seemed to disappear in sight of her boy. His eyes were alight with the most innocent and purest of love a child had for his mother.

"Nothing, that can't be fixed with a kiss." Mary smiled sadly with a teasing, playful, look. "Go on …" She motioned her head for him to go to his mother, her tone nearly an order to the footman.

He was frowning as he walked up to Anna, but seemed more confused when the crying woman cupped his cheek. Her wise and hurting eyes searched the face that took after hers, but it was his father's eyes that she got lost in. She was conscious and amused that she had to find her toes just to kiss him these days, but she didn't mind. They both exchanged a joint kiss on the cheek, Anna's hand resting on the back of his neck as she emotionally moved in and whispered something in his ear. When she was done she nuzzled her nose into his Jaw.

In sight of a victory in a life, in sight of a mother and child, a mother and son, reciprocating love, Mary watched in dejection. Watching Anna and John, seeing, feeling, how much they loved one another, it nearly brought the woman to tears. She couldn't even remember if she had ever a moment with George like that. Suddenly, it occurred to her that her own boy, her own reminder of Matthew and her love's own victory. He had no memory, had no feelings of want and safety like this. He was a boy, on some rural American highway, lost and alone at a too young age. A thousand miles away from home, he couldn't count the number times he wondered, by a hobo fire, if his mama loved him, and deciding that the answer was probably not. It wasn't true, it wasn't the right answer, but it wasn't his burden to find the truth. It was her responsibility, it was her fault that the only memories that she had of him was his bitter anger. It was her fault that he grew to hate her in those long eight years. To feel the fires of resentment toward a woman who could do what she did to her own child. But even now, in the memory of his last bitter words to her in this very lobby, all she wanted was to hold him again. To say how terribly sorry she was …

How she still loved him so terribly much.

"What's this?"

They turned to find Mr. Carson watching with puzzlement and stern disapproval. He was a sentimental man … somewhere deep inside. But a drawing room filled with Lords and Ladies with no one to serve was completely unacceptable. Mother and Son or not, two servants sharing in a loving petting during duties was the height of reproach, especially in a chaotic and completely unusual night such as this. He might not have been butler anymore, but he'd not let standards slip any more than they had under Thomas. Seeing the cranky old butler's disapproval was a tonic to Lady Mary's heart sickness, for a moment at least.

"Another casualty of Cousin Annabelle's rampage." She replied with a sigh of trying patients.

Carson grumbled. "Yes, well … one does invest in shutters during the rainy season." There was a clear distaste in his voice. "Now …" He sighed. "Mr. Bates, Anna, as shocking, trying, and inappropriate as some of our guest can be. It is the duty of every man or woman in service to put their best foot forward and to look within to find a better one's self till the storm passes." The old butler lectured.

With a sniffle, the Lady's Maid broke apart from her son. "Right you are, Mr. Carson." She cleared her throat.

"Right" Mr. Carson drew out in puzzlement, confused of Anna's sudden lapse in experience after all these long years. Suddenly he moved his fingers like he was a conductor at a royal symphony for the king. "Now, Anna, take that tray back down to replace it. Mr. Bates if you will …" He motioned the footman to follow back inside the drawing room.

Mary smirked, heart still heavy with thoughts of her son. She turned to JJ, placing a gloved hand on the boy's shoulder. "Well, Mr. Bates, we shan't keep the drill sergeant waiting." She smirked. When the teen led the woman back to the drawing room, the old butler lifted an eyebrow in reproach to her words. But the Lady Mary only smirked lightly in mischief as she passed.

"Oh, Mary, there you are …"

Approaching her was Mama and Edith. Her mother looked frazzled, the sudden rashes of crimson anger over the night's conversations and the question of George's fate had worn the handsome woman to the bone. Lady Grantham would've liked nothing better than to send everyone to bed. But at the moment it wasn't the right mood, the right tone, to end the evening on. It was obvious that all Cora Crawley was praying for was a quiet house. She needed some time to regain her bearings. It didn't mean that she was gonna sleep tonight, or, in fact, that anyone in their family would. But she'd like just one superficial thing off her mind.

"I have a bit of a favor to ask …" Cora linked her arm in Mary's as she led her toward the back of the room.

"More like a demand." Edith countered with exasperation as she trailed behind them. In response to the accusation, the older woman hooked her other arm into Edith's and pulled her close in disciplining reproach.

"A favor sounds much nicer." She shot her middle daughter a dark look.

Mary rolled her eyes. "And, yet, so dishonest ..." She sighed haughtily at her mother with a knowing one.

"Mama wants us to pull a double act." Edith said with the pinnacle opposite of enthusiasm.

There was a slacked jaw shock on the bombshell's face. "Oh, Mama, you can't be serious …!" She complained bitterly with an irritated whine.

Cora glared harshly at her two girls. "Now, listen here!" She snapped quietly. "This has been an awful night, one of the worst of our lives. I don't think, after today, a little song would hurt anyone. We need just something to cap off the night on some sort of pleasant note." She explained sternly.

"Yes, nothing says pleasant like Edith's key work." Mary sighed in exasperation.

Edith glared daggers. "Or Mary's off key pitch." She fired back.

Cora held her hands up, still linked in her daughter's arms. "I don't care who is off-key or misses a note. I care that everyone has something to think about other than the vile nonsense that Annabelle spouted about George and Sybbie or a poor murdered Princess!" She hissed at her daughters. "Now if you don't want to do it for our guests, than do it for your Papa, to revive him." She pulled them closer with a deep maternal warning.

Mary sighed in exasperation. "Edith, is this the famous 'Jewish mother's guilt' we've heard of?" She asked sarcastically.

"I dare say. It is in her blood." The golden haired marchioness agreed suspiciously.

Cora smirked lightly sensing her girls' defeat. "Thank you!" She kissed both their cheeks. They were quiet a long moment as they watched Lady Grantham begin going from group to group announcing that a mini-concert was about to be started up.

"Poor, Mama …" She sighed. "Uneasy lies the head that bears the crown." Mary quoted distractedly.

"Poor, Mama?" Edith said in outrage. "How about poor us?" She offered with a shake of her head. "I haven't played the piano in ages, and there's no sheet music." The golden woman protested.

Rolling her eyes, Mary turned languidly back to her sister. "Well, surely, you can remember something, Edith." She chastised in irritation.

There was a long pause as the woman racked her brain. Then, for a short stint she seemed surprised in fondness. But, quickly, it faded to something sad. Hesitantly, she turned to Mary, but was a loss of words.

"Well …" She drew out. "There is a tune." She replied hesitantly.

The business woman rolled her eyes. "Well, well done, Edith." She bit sarcastically. "Is it something I know?" She asked.

"Well, yes, it's just that …" Her sister began.

"Good, then, let's get on with it." She blew her off.

"But Mary, it's from the war …" She protested.

There was no recognition in the caution in Edith's voice. "Yes, I dare say, there are many songs from all different wars. If the soldier's in the trenches can sing it, I'm sure we can too." She finished condescendingly as she paced by the piano.

"No, Mary, you don't understand …"

"Ladies and Gentlemen …!" Mary announced to their uneasy guests who were starting to gather around them. "As you know, back in the day, my sister and I were quite the traveling act." She jokingly prodded in true show-woman fashion.

"A true vaudeville act if there ever was one." Tom heckled with good natured fun.

"More like a slap stick routine." Mary countered.

The crowd chuckled, giving the red eyed woman a little more confidence. "But between the rakes stepped on …" She began.

"And Banana peels slipped on." Edith added jovially with a smile. There were a few less laughs than Mary and Tom's banter. Mary turned and glared for a split second at the wilting smile from her sister on the bench.

"Yes …" She cleared her throat in acknowledgement before moving on from an awkward Edith. "Between the, _well established_ , comedy act, we also were known to give a musical concert or two for an adoring audience." She announced.

"Yes, a captive one." Robert added with a tired charm.

Mary allowed the laughter to echo. She saw that it was exactly what Mama was hoping for in the light of her deep blue eyes, tired and sad. "Yes, well, wounded officers do make a wonderful audience." She added.

"They can't get up and walk out." Edith broke in again.

There was only a sprinkle of laughs this time. Cora coughed awkwardly, Robert looked away in embarrassment, and Tom looked like he wanted to laugh, but not at the Marchioness's joke. Mary didn't have to cut her sister a look of contempt. Edith huffed, turning her back to the crowd. With a pouting face, she tapped the bass key at the end lightly in sulking. She was sure that if the children where here, they would've laughed at her jokes.

"Anyway …" Her sister cleared her throat again. "So with no further ado, and god only knows, no more jokes!" She shot Edith a dirty look. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you … The Crawley Sisters." She gave a sweeping bow. The crowd applauded as Mary turned to Edith, who seemed hesitant to play. When she looked up guiltily, Mary sternly motioned her to begin.

Then, she wished she hadn't.

The moment the first few cords created a base for the music, Mary was transported to a night much like this. A room filled with strangers, missing arms and legs, hands and feet. Her family was there, mixed amongst the crowd. Everyone was worried. Everyone was heart sick, though they dared not show it to the wounded men around them. Much like now, back then, they were all worried for a missing Captain Crawley. He had gone on patrol and he never came back. All that day, all the night before, she imagined him in a ditch somewhere, face down, sucking in mud. Some faceless Storm trooper was rummaging through his pockets. She wanted to cry every time this imaginary villain took their stuffed dog, their lucky charm from him. Matthew, saying her name in protest of the action as the Hun left him dead in the cold mud of France. When she awoke, Anna was holding her, and she found herself sobbing uncontrollably.

She was standing by this very piano that night, the night of the concert. Edith only knew a few songs, but when Mama put the little variety show together, she thought, as she did now, that a nice song would balance the evening. When Edith began playing this very song, the words, now as then, spoke to her on some grand, universal, level. She had sung the song before, but, then, they were just words. In the aftermath of Matthew gone missing, all of those old feelings she tried to burry so much, had taken a permanent residency in her heart. That night, the night Edith told her that he was missing, she found that she had been fooling herself. And nothing on this earth proved that more than when this song came from her lips.

They were both engaged to other people, and though she wanted Matthew more than anything in the world, in the universe, she had failed to capitalize on her nature. If it had been anything else in the world, Mary would stop short of cutting Lavinia's throat to get what she wanted. Then, there was Kamal, and that was what kept it from her, everything she dreamed of. She found it so easy to tell Richard, as easy as it was to keep it a secret from him. But Mary was tormented by what Matthew would think of her if he ever found out.

All of it was trumped when it came to Matthew Crawley, when it came to her love for this young man. It was the truest thing she had ever felt for someone else in all her life. In holding communion with that all-consuming place within her soul she found herself restrained. Her selfish, spoiled, and unkind ways were tempered by a need to be seen as something else, to be someone else. For once she didn't want to be seen as the uncaring princess on top of a shiny hill, she wanted Matthew to see her as somebody good and honorable. That was why she made no play for him under her gentler rival's nose. It was why she resigned herself to Sir Richard's gaudy estate and his roughness with her in private. When he grabbed her, when he kissed her forcibly, she did not protest. After all, she felt she had deserved it. She had ruined herself with an Ottoman Nobleman, and she allowed his forceful lust for her, and her sputtered confidence in herself, ruin her only chance at true happiness. She had broken Matthew's heart over it all. She saw in her self-loathing that she so gregariously deserved to be punished for her sins. But every night, she still dreamed of him.

She still dreamed of her secret Perseus.

Then, as if someone from up above heard the prayers made by her broken heart. It was just when the song made more sense than anything in the world. He appeared from the crowd, hat under arm, crooked smirk. And when he looked at her with his crystal eyes, it was as if there was no one else in the room. Papa came to shake his hand and he traded a few words with his friends Tom and Sybil. But he couldn't help himself, he was drawn to her. It was as if they were steel and magnet when he walked to join her. Matthew Crawley was not a man of public speech, and certainly, not a creature that craved public spectacle. But when he saw Mary Crawley there, at an altar, with people on either side … Call it instinct, call it subconscious, but he knew that he was meant, destined, to be there at her side at any altar. And together they joined musically, as if joining hands. There, they proclaimed in a final verse, in unison, an unspoken "I do" that would interconnect their souls forever in time.

All these years later and this time, Mary couldn't find the words. Edith played the music, the same tone, the same key. She anticipated Mary's rhythm, but there were no words that came out of her mouth. The crowd was confused, watching the glamorous beauty stand silently at her sister's side. But she couldn't do it, she couldn't bear it. She couldn't take the torment of a mind that knew reality, verses, a heart that pumped a dream, and a love's prayer that it could happen again. That a song that meant so much, that she understood so well, would conjure the same magic twice. That if she spoke those words again, if they echoed from her lips, that her one true love would come walking through that door. That Matthew's and her greatest accomplishment, their only proof in this world that their love ever existed, would return to her. In her heart, she knew that if she reached the end of the song, and it didn't happen, it would ruin everything. That when she'd hear the song again, she'd not think of Matthew, and his smirk, his voice joining hers in a duet written in the stars. All she would remember is how their child, her son, never came back. That her cold heart had driven him away, had betrayed him, and then had the nerve to hope that he'd come home to it again on a song and a prayer. Like his father had.

" _Sometimes when I feel bad  
and things look blue.  
I wish a pal I had... say one like you.  
Someone within my heart to build a throne,  
someone who'd never part, to call my own."_

Lady Grantham began to sing from the small crowd. People turned to her in confusion, confused why Lady Mary was standing so silently. Slowly her daughter turned to make eye contact, and saw the deepest of understanding in her mother's eyes, in Sybil's eyes, in George's eyes. Cora didn't falter. Her voice was steady. But she saw the glistening in the candlelight of forming tears in her daughter's eyes. She knew, though not alone, why Mary wasn't singing. Slowly, everyone else sang, picking up the chorus.

" _If you were the only girl in the world  
and I were the only boy.  
Nothing else would matter in the world today.  
We could go on loving in the same old way …"_

Lady Mary's heart was already shattered and the remaining pieces were being granulated by the grinding weight of a Pandora's Box of horrible decisions that never ended with hope. Wordlessly, she turned to Edith, who was openly crying, her back still turned to the party. She had never seen her sister more apologetic in her entire life. Mary couldn't bring herself to hate her sister. She couldn't bring herself to do anything but feel a deep sorrow that blinded heart and soul to anything else that was possible in the spectrum of human emotion.

Suddenly, the door to the drawing room opened slowly. Immediately, Mary's heart stopped, her breath caught in her lungs. As if on cue, the rest of her family stopped and turned to the door. Edith had stopped playing, whirling around. There was such heartfelt anticipation from the Crawley's that the rest of the party turned to see what they were so hopeful would turn up.

But in a room that was as quiet as a church, there was a jangle of metal, crystal, and porcelain. From the shadows of the foyer, they watched with sunken hearts as Mr. Mosley clumsily backed into the room carrying a tray of new coffee, tea, and wine. Resettling the heavy tray, he let out a labored sigh, before he looked up. The old man was suddenly cornered. His mouth hung open in shock and awkwardness under the confused scrutiny of an entire drawing room of Lords and Ladies. He stammered for a second as he looked from face to face nervously.

"I'm – Uh, I'm sorry." He cleared his throat. "Mr. Bates and Mr. Barrow returned, rather upset and rather in vein really. Anna wanted to stay with them so I volunteered to take the tray up." He explained in confusion, his eyes searching the crowd, looking for some sort of reason why he was under such a spotlight. He turned to Mr. Carson for some help, but the old butler seemed to sink in his shoes, eyes turning the Lady Mary in a deep sympathy.

It was the last straw, the one that broke the camel's back. In one point in time she had said "thank god" and now many years later in a different, but the same, scenario, she exclaimed "Oh god" covering her mouth. Relief in a moment the man she loved had returned to her as tears fell in another when a bumbling footman announced that her final hope had come to naught. That somewhere out there, her son, her boy, her George was face down in a muddy ditch. He was alone on a stormy night, waiting to be counted in a statistic. To be found by uninterested army labors that would toss his body in a pile on the back of the truck. No dignity or honor befitting a boy, a young man, who came from such love, such impossible love between two people so wholly different, and yet shared a soul.

With short strides, held back by a silken mermaid dress ordered from Hollywood, Lady Mary fled the drawing room. Her sobbing voice and clacking of her high heels on the floor passed a confused and generally remorseful Mosley, though he wasn't sure why. While their party watched with a range of sympathetic emotions, Tom and Robert stood, but Lady Grantham discouraged their pursuit with a hand gesture. The old man stammered under his breath watching Lady Mary slam the door behind her, before he turned back to the room.

"I'm, I'm sorry, Your Lordship."

Mary fled as far as she could, till she disappeared in complete darkness. She finally halted when she felt at risk of twisting her ankles and her slim thighs ran into the corner of a table in the foyer. The candelabra made a metallic scrape on the flat surface, wobbling, throwing strange shadows by the rocking flames. She sobbed through hard breaths as she bent over and braced herself on the long table by the fireplace. Even in complete darkness something drew her to this spot and she didn't have to know why.

Somewhere in time and space a couple danced in the solitude of tormented feelings of a deepest love. Posted on this table was a gramophone that narrated unrelatedly to the now star-crossed and secret love that must have been the poorest kept secret in the world. And in that moment they hadn't tried to hide it as they danced together. She was his stick, and he was her dreams. They weren't happy, but they were content to be drowned together in the delicious torment of their Russian Novel of never was and could've been in the crumbling yesterdays of a dying way of life.

But now, Mary had found herself in the final chapter. The author of her fate was a vodka swirling romantic with a taste for suffering and self-loathing. She was a heroine that would be analyzed by half-a-dozen Oxford professors about the trappings of human fallacies. She was a woman who had it all, money, a position, love. And not once, but twice, two husbands, two children, and all of them were gone. Thus, her story ends in a crumbling gothic manor, a shining castle turned into a haunted and vine covered ruin destined to be forgotten, like her. She knew that she'd never grow old, that she'd live forever. That she'd always be trapped within these halls, within all the glorious yesterdays she wasted waiting for something better to turn up.

Lady Mary welcomed the darkness to fall over her, to take over her, to claim her. She had nothing left to live for, nothing left to offer. She'd sit and wait for an old age that would never come, so she'd take obscurity, take isolation. If not suicide of the body, than surely it would be suicide of the mind. But while her children and husbands were dead, she prayed that whatever evil spirit plagued her, come claim her now, least she not see all of her family, all of its legacy, crumble to nothing.

Then, a blinding flash tore through the lobby, as if a lightning bolt had stuck between the overlook itself. In the raw flash of light something flickered brightly in front of her. On the table where the gramophone had been, she saw that something was sitting there. Suddenly, all the light died like a blown fuse and with a terrifying explosion of noise, a roll of thunder roared savagely through the manor. And in its wake a silver chalice appeared.

It was a distinct reminder of everything that she couldn't escape and resigned to lose herself within. Someone had removed George's "Grail" from the dining room and had inexplicably placed it on Mary and Matthew's table. She had remembered, before Shrimpie was forced to finish the story, that they had left the dining room on a high. Mary had never been more proud, more appreciative, and more eager in seeing her child again after tonight's dinner. It seemed on a high from the story, Mama or Papa had asked one of the servants to place the priceless artifact somewhere on full display in momentary pride. Now, after she learned the tragedy, the horror, and the soul gutting price that had been paid to gain the object, she understood why George sent it home.

He couldn't stand the sight of it.

Now she knew exactly how he felt. When she looked it over, all she saw was the security she had taken from him. Lady Mary wasn't sure how George had escaped the clutches of her former suitor, but after everything that happened, he should've returned home. He should've recovered here, to take shelter in her arms while he had come to terms with what had happened in that savage place. But instead he retreated to the poisonous solitude of the ancient deserts on the fringes of the world. There he suffered heartily with the things that had happened and let it turn him into something that people like Annabelle could slander as a monster wrapped in a gallant illusion. And Lady Mary knew she had done that to him. She had exiled him to that hard existence.

With a heart so heavy, so filled with a whirlwind of old emotions, like the final moments of a dying person's life. She picked up the chalice and looked down with a deep shame. It was, in that moment of sadness, a symbol of all her failures. It was the treasure, the thirty pieces of silver, and the cursed object that was given to her as a price for her treachery. It was forever a reminder of her foolish destruction that was no ones to blame but her own.

"Oh, Matthew …" She whispered. "Why, why didn't you take me with you?" She asked bitterly as she stared at the spot where he had once stood with is cane. A time, a moment, when her heart clenched from the upper balcony, knowing in her soul that he was somehow waiting for her. And even now, all these years later, somehow she felt that he was still waiting for her, occupying himself with records till she found him again. In the bliss of old love intermingled with the tragedy of its final conclusion, tears slid down her milky cheeks.

She had failed not only her son, but the love that bore him.

Someday, Downton Abbey would fall. It would become another forgotten palace lost in the haunted forests and weeds of a neglected country side. Forgotten in these ruins, would be the love of the Lady and the Lawyer. A marker in a forgotten graveyard ensnared by ivy that obscured the name of a man named Matthew Crawley and a name on a list of many dead pilots that belonged to Captain George Crawley. And no one would know, no one would care, that they existed, and that Lady Mary Crawley had loved them with all her heart. Now there was nothing to show that on this earth, in this universe, that they had ever loved each other. Their story was written in the stars and there it would remain, in decipherable to a whole world of people, as if they didn't exist at all.

Her tears slowly dropped onto the silver Grail as she began to sob quietly. With all of her heart she wanted Matthew back, she wanted her children back. It possessed her, it consumed her, and it was all that defined her existence now. It was an enduring decay fueled by wanting and regret. In her very soul she longed for Matthew. She reached through an abyss to hold him, to grasp a dozen vivid memories, and pull him to her. In whatever last shreds of humanity that was left inside the utterly devastated beauty, she reached for her only comfort, her only joy, her only true love.

She squeezed her eyes shut to see him, to feel him. All the while she was unaware that her falling tears were dripping on the silver body of the Grail. The roll of thunder and the pounding of rain obscured the fizzled sounds of steam, like they were dropping on a heated grill. With ever drop, slowly glowing Aramaic characters began to appear. But this time they weren't blue. Slowly, a deep crimson glow began to form the runes. The power of an African ruby infused into a sorrowful and utterly in love teenage girl's innocent wish made flesh brought the chalice alive as the storm intensified. Soon the letters were aflame with life, the entire cup surrounded by a fierce aura.

Suddenly Mary felt her chest expend, a deep pressure pulling on her entire being. When she opened her eyes, she thought that she was caught in a wind tunnel of noise. An African ceremonial chant intermingled by an impossibly youthful but unmistakable familiar girlish voice whispering to a dolly such a heartbroken wish after a day in which a still born baby, their first child, was buried. Suddenly it occurred to Mary, that her fertility problem was fixed in an operating room, but Cora Crawley's was done magically, but at a price to those she bore from her body healthily.

Fore all magic came at a price and immortality was a curse for an eldest daughter that had loved so deeply.

There was fear, confusion, and disbelief as her chest began to glow like an illuminated ruby had replaced her heart. The glowing from her chest engulfed the grail as if it was aflame. Her will, the infused magic of her mother's wish to bring her into this world, was co-opting the chalice's power. Then, in all the noise, voices, confusion and the storm around her, all Mary could do was think of Matthew.

Then, the ruby's transparent flames rushed forth from the Grail in a wave of a crimson wall. A vortex of purifying light washed over the lobby of Downton Abbey like a tidal wave. It engulfed the walls, paintings, sundries, and furniture as the rush of the sea at high tide. And in its wake the cobwebs, dust, and darkness disappeared, leaving it shining and new as it had been when Mary was a girl. An old woman's curse upon the castle momentarily was broken as the shockwave reached every corner till it hit something next to Mary. She backed away in fright at the large vortex of golden, ethereal, light spun next to her.

It was violent and powerful as crimson and gold swirled, fighting and reforming, pushing and pulling. Their duel was punching a hole through the fabric of heaven and reality. All the while the forty plus years of a teenage girl's wish, was turning a large ethereal ball of beauty and awe into a figure. It was a form that was hunched over the table, heaving on air from lungs that hadn't been used in twenty years. Slowly, the figure was starting to take shape as the golden hue was dissipating. Mary frowned hard in study as he became clearer and clearer.

Leaning heavily over the table was a man in an old olive drab combat uniform. His tin helmet fell from his head, clanking on the table. He had slicked back golden hair, his glowing features had sharp angles to them and his skin was an Englishman's pale. He was not stolen from time, but from a state of mind, a helpless comfort to be dressed for combat, though he could only watch helplessly. But now he was here, breathing heavily … breathing heavily?

He stared down at his hands to find they had a golden, ethereal, hue. But for the first time in so long these hands had the feeling of sensation. His face felt the swirl of the cold midnight air. The rush of senses, feelings, and oxygen hobbled him. But all he could think of in that moment was his last memory, his first memory, and what he had been doing before this moment.

"George!" The man coughed in alarm. "George, my dearest little chap!" He wheezed in distress to get back to the young man in such danger.

"Matthew?"

The velvety tomes of a voice stole the breath, mind, and very reason from the materializing man. He felt that the world had stopped as thunder shook the manor. It was a voice he could never forget, a voice that built him, that made him. He had been nobody his entire life and she had made him something. To hear it was to hear the call of his own conscious, the best part of himself guiding him in the right direction. It was a voice that always led him home.

"Mary?"

Slowly, Matthew Crawley, after twenty long years, set his eyes upon his wife standing in the foyer of a house that by all rights should've been theirs. She had long glossy locks of dark hair nearly hiding one side of her face. The dress was silk, mermaid cut, and exactly how he imagined she looked when he heard about it in the dress store from George. She looked like Venus, a goddess of love, his goddess. But it was her red tinted eyes that he was drawn. They were wide, disbelieving, unfathomed, and hopelessly praying. She hadn't aged a day, and neither had his love, since he had last seen her.

"Matthew …!" She shook her head.

His crystal eyes had golden tears as he slowly, enchantingly, strode toward her. She was still as a statue, eyes glassed and glazed over. Her gloved hands were shaking with the Grail in their tight grip. He could feel the air on his face, the plush rug underfoot, and the thundering of his heart in his ears. But all he wanted, all he's truly ever wanted in this life, after it, and forever, was to feel Mary Crawley under palm. He had to touch her, had to know she was real. He only ever wanted to know that she was real, that this brand of unshakable madness was not within his own head. He stopped inches from her, taking a long moment to study her, his goddess, his Andromeda.

Tears fell as he beheld her after so many years. "Oh god, Mary …" He sputtered when realized that this wasn't a dream, that this was real.

Gently, he lifted a slightly glowing hand and held it out in front of him. For a long beat, Mary seemed broken in being completely overwhelmed by such sudden and raw emotions of a moment she could never conceive in her wildest imagination would ever be possible. But slowly, she began to lift her hand to meet his.

But as both husband and wife reached for one another, the ruby began to fade. Slowly the runes became purple, than blue. The power of a teenage girl's wish, could not withhold the power infused within the Hebrew artifact and heaven itself on two fronts. For a moment, An African curse, and the familiarity in Mary's blood had taken control of the chalice. But in the end, they were no match for the power within the artifact. Though Mary was able to control it for a short time due to her shared blood with him …

The Grail of Prague had only one master.

Matthew began to become engulfed in light again as the crimson aura faded. Both husband and wife were in dismay as they felt their reunion being torn from them. Quickly, while the seconds passed, Matthew was losing shape, losing his solid form, being dragged back to the land of eternity. But he still reached for her. He still fought as he always had, to be with Mary.

For just a split second, Mary could almost feel the familiar texture of his large hand. Her memories were suddenly flooded with how they used to pet her hair. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night from those same hands stroking her cheek. She look up to see Matthew wide awake in the dark, watching her sleep, completely taken with the idea that they were married, that she actually existed. She remembered kissing the palm in silent confirmation that it was possible to be that happy. The fury of light hurt her eyes, but she didn't stop, she fought, reaching for that happiness once more.

Then, there was a large, primal, elemental explosion of light from a lightning bolt. The entire lobby was captured in the flash. For a long and confused moment, it seemed as if the entire world, the entire known existence, was captured in an endless plane of white light. Then there was an eardrum destroying roar of divine reproach in an earth shattering thunder clap that turned the world into darkness. And then suddenly, the sound of rain pattered on windows, smoke sauntered from tiny flames, and Lady Mary Crawley found herself standing in the middle of the lobby with her hand outstretched … but there was no one there.

They were the Lady and the Lawyer, eternally together, forever apart.

"No … no, please …" Mary cried weakly her eyes searching around her. But it was as if she had recovered from a fever dream. It was as if nothing had happened at all. Looking down she saw the tail end of fading runes on the Grail, like burned out wicks of midnight candles. "No!" She sobbed, shaking the silver chalice. But in a blink of an eye it became just one more useless piece of decorative silver to be polished and set out.

"No, please, come back! Come … come back!" Mary wheezed, shaking the Grail, but it was completely dead, like her.

She felt the almost, the flickered second of a having him back, crush her. It was as if destiny, fate, or God was beating her about the head till she had no sense left. She felt herself fall to her knees as she emptily shook the silver cup in her hand.

"Please …" She closed her eyes in the most heartbroken sob ever heard. "Please come back …!" She begged. Not of the cup, not of the power within her, but of the light, the figure, her husband. She begged for Matthew not to leave her again, not again, not on this night. But her whispered sobs only echoed softly in the darkness of an empty foyer. She lost the strength to even hold herself upright as she collapsed on all fours.

"Don't leave me …" She sobbed into the rug as she slowly laid her face on the plush fibers.

A wetness that smelled of earth and grass entered her nostrils. A soaking liquid stained the quarter of her forehead that touched the rug. Mary lifted her head brokenly to realize that she had fallen on someone's wet and earth clogged footprints that trailed across the rug. She remembered in a momentary distraction from her pain, that Carson had mentioned that someone had come through the front door while they were at dinner. She tracked the foot prints with her cold eyes to the grand staircase. There she saw the glistening wood finish of the banister where a hand print of something fresh and wet stained the pommel. Then, something fell from above. She saw that it had been a candle holder that she had used earlier, before dinner. She had blown it out and set it on the overlook railing when she led Edith down. Quickly she looked up to see a shadowy figure staggering dazedly in view, before disappearing behind a column.

She spied that the runes on the Grail glowed softly for a split second in view of the figure before fading again. In her fevered mind, filled with sorrow and helplessness, she came to a startling realization. She looked down at the chalice in hand, then up to the overlook where a figure was shuffling determinedly forward, using the railing to hold himself up. She suddenly remembered how the Grail was present for when Matthew's voice called to her at dinner, and how it glowed when he appeared to her moments ago. She also recalled how winded he was, how overwhelmed to be alive once more.

Quickly, Mary struggled to her feet, tossing the Grail onto a sofa chair in passing. She quickly lit up her fallen candle from the floor by a nearby holder. She didn't waste any time, holding her extravagant evening gown up to her shins with one hand and lighting the way with a bare candle with the other. She stormed up the stairs, chasing the shadow who was making a slow progress to the west wing.

When she reached the ascent of the stairs she looked down the hallway to find the figure seemed to have stopped. His hands were full, each one carrying an item. The closer Mary got, the more she saw that the figure was male, tall, but hobbled, like Matthew had been. The shadow looked to have reached whatever destination he had been going for. But it made Mary pause as she gained on him, halting a distance away.

The man was winded, groggy, and in pain as he stood in front of the nursery. He breathed heavily, leaning his head against the spot next to the door frame, but he did not advance. It looked as if he was waiting for someone, looking for someone that should've been there. He swallowed hard, taking shallow breaths in the dark.

"Matthew?!" She asked with all the hope and love in the world within her softly emotional voice.

The figure seemed to respond with some urgency. The velvety beauty of the elegant sound seemed to be a part of him, something sacred and rare, like a fine wine. He knew it in his worst nightmares and most pleasant dreams. It was a sound he loved dearly and deeply, even in detriment to his own bodily harm. It was the voice of the most beautiful woman in the world to him. Lady Mary was the woman he had been waiting so long for in this spot. Slowly, the figure turned and pushed off the wall. Limping forward he revealed himself in the soft candle light.

 _[An Ideal Marriage – John Lunn]_

His grown out curls were soaking wet, clinging to the back of his popped up coat collar. The dark blue eyes of a young man that was hardened and haunted by tragedy and violence were glazed and cast into another time and place. His double breasted leather coat had a hole in the shoulder where he had been shot clean through, point blank, by a Luger pistol. Blood was leaking down his arm under sleeve, tracing the barrel of his infamous Webley Revolver that lay grasped weakly in his useless arm, and dripping on the red carpet. A weatherworn navy blue scarf knitted with love by Isobel Crawley was wrapped tightly around his leg where a Luftwaffe Captain had stabbed him with a Hitler Youth knife.

"Mama …" George Crawley whispered hoarsely.

His voice had no malice, only pain, only love as he saw the woman standing before him. There was something childlike in its innocence that shocked Mary and brought her to immediate tears in overwhelming emotions that tore her apart and remade her a million different times. After years of hearing of the dangerous, daring, audacious, and dashing George Crawley and his adventures. Mary only saw a young man, her young man, the bravest, kindest, young lad she had ever known. She didn't see a cartoonish rogue or the hero of a pulp story …

She only saw her baby.

"Mama … I got it!" He grunted painfully. "I, I got it!" He stumbled forward feverishly, extending a closed fist that held something. "I … I got it, Mama." He whispered determinedly as he advanced toward her. Stumbling, he entrusted her with the item as he came face to face with her.

"I got it, I … I got the …"

Suddenly, Matthew's revolver slipped from George's grip thunking on the floor. He began to fall forward. Immediately, without thought, Mary encased him protectively in her arms. But, while the young war hero might have feverishly thought that he was six again, he was still a grown man. His dead weight toppled Mary to the floor. The sound of her dress ripping echoed down the hall. But none of that seemed to matter now that he was in her arms.

"TOM! PAPA! PAPA!" Mary screamed loudly, as loudly as she could.

"I got it, Mama, I got it!" George repeated in a dazed loop as the blood loss was worsening. She immediately held him in her arms cradling his head against the supple pale flesh of her bosom.

"Oh George, George …!" Mary sobbed as she buried her face into his hair, rocking back and forth.

"CARSON! SOMEONE HELP!"

"I got it … I got it …" He kept repeating.

"Hold on, my darling, you're home. Oh god, you're home!" She kissed his face all over. From below she could see an army of candles. "They're coming, Darling, they're coming!" She whispered. "It's going to be all right, you're home now. You're home with me!" She rocked him back and forth, listening to the sound of feet rushing for the stairs and voices call out to her. But she couldn't answer. All she could do was focus on the young man in her arms. She remembered the first time she had held him. He had been so tiny, so beautiful, and so perfect. She could've stared at him for hours. And now it was a cruel irony that here at the end … it was the same way. That it took this moment to remember, remember that he was her child.

"I got it …"

"Got what, my darling?" She asked in confusion, trying to keep him lucid, though he was far from it at this point. But then it occurred to her that George had put something in her hand before he fell. Her fist was still clenched around it, even as she held him.

"I got it, I got it, Mama …" George repeated with tears falling from his eyes. As the footsteps got closer, Mary shifted her son gently to lie his face into the crook of her pale neck. Then, carefully, she opened her silken fist to see what he had entrusted in her palm.

She made an audible noise of a primal sorrow. Looking away, she squeezed her eyes shut in an old pain. Closing her gloved fist around the item, she turned to her wounded son in her arms. She had never been sorrier for anything in her entire life, especially in the shadow of the place that they lay outside of. Gently, chastely, she kissed him and then held him tightly. Burying her face in his curls, Lady Mary Crawley rocked her only child back and forth in quiet tears.

In her grasped was a little vile of pediatric medicine with a faded name on the label.

 _ **Talbot, Cora**_

"The medicine, Mama! I … I got the medicine, Mama …"


	22. The Queen and the Soldier - Part I

**The Queen and the Soldier: Part I**

 _There was no place in one's mind or in the everlasting soul of man in which the love of God goes when a fighter's blood is up. Talk of right or wrong, of reason of the human brain, fails when faced with the brutality of battle. You're either a killer or you're not. Things that don't occur to most men come as an instinct and you're not yourself …_

 _Or are you?_

 _All of these questions can only be answered when bullets run out, when all the shells are spent, and you stand before a man with a swastika on his lapel with a curved knife of Damascus steel in your hand. Hand to hand combat is not fought, in these moments, by learning or by reason. It's a madness, a complete surrender to the nature that god has given you and expects to be suppressed in the sanctity of righteousness. A duality that every man must come to terms with, and a soldier must set aside wholly to survive a war … and to survive himself within it. If you're consumed by these higher questions, than the answers will come to you from the Lord of Hosts himself, for you are not long for this mortal world. A scrap like this takes a certain madness beyond doubt, beyond reason. You cut, scratch, punch, bite. You beat your enemy into the ground till there is nothing left. And then you move on, if it's possible. Then, you forget, you store it away and never remember what was done in those dark moments._

 _But there is no escape for some._

 _How many times? How many times does one give over to those darker impulses? Let the rage, the hatred, and the suffering come flowing out of that dark place before it becomes you? How long before you become a killer? How long before you realize you are what you tell yourself you are not? When does it occur to you that a life of tragedy and mistakes had made you into something that your enemies all say you are?_

 _It happens when you kill a man in front of a place where you used to get ice cream with your mother's Lady's Maid. It happened when you cut the hamstring of an enemy captain where you used to ride the Carousal with your aunt and cousins. It happens when your crippled enemy's brain matter sprays on the greening of a bronze sign of dedication with your paternal grandmother's name on it. You can only know when you've bled on a wadded leaflet that promoted your own family home's tours._

 _It is a hard truth, a hard thing, to defend your home. Fore, once you've spilled blood, there is no going back. No amount of fond memories or loves long past that can wash out what happened when invaders came to destroy it. In the end, they always succeed. The stones and structures remain, but the memories … the memories change. When home becomes battlefield, death is the only thing that remains. All the childhood memories, the fairs and stock shows become a distant memory when foreign blood you've spilled forever taints the ground where a mother held you in her arms, kissed you, and loved you._

 _It made him want to leave that pure place he had sullied to defend. All the young man can remember is that he had to get away, he had to stop the madness. The job wasn't done, there were too many of them, and he was wounded. He had to get back, he had to get downstairs, and he had to get back home. There had been something there. It was help, he thought, help was downstairs. They had a medical kit, they had Thomas. If he could only get to Thomas, there was a chance to get help and finish the job._

 _But as he struggled up to the imposing estate bathed in ominous shadows and back lit by forks of violent lightning, he couldn't remember why he was here. He was losing blood, and his mind was going the more he struggled down the gravel path. Soon he couldn't remember why he needed to get to Thomas. He had a job to do, and he couldn't do it without Thomas. But he couldn't remember what the job was. Then he remembered incorrectly to the last time he was under so much stress to get back home._

 _It was the baby._

 _He had to get back to Thomas, for the baby, for Cora. Of course! He, he had the medicine in his jacket pocket and he had to get back to the house. But he was so tired, and it was so wet and cold. But he didn't care, he had to get back. His mother was waiting for him, they were all waiting for him. The boy had to be the hero, because, there was no one else. It was all up to him now. He guessed that this was what being a grown-up felt like._

 _For a moment, he reached back. It wasn't that he thought that he was a child. But in his wounded fever the man held to one truth while the rest slipped away. It was a truth that haunted him, that drove him, that ended men's lives across four continents and tormented him. It was the simple drive to everything he had ever done since he was seven years old. That was to make things right, to redeem himself for not being a hero. A baby died, his baby sister, his only friend. With all his soul he still thought, believed, that he could've saved her, his first great love._

 _And for the rest of his life, even when faced with its end, George Crawley was still trying to save Cora Talbot's life._

 _He felt something warm, something rare and familiar. He felt himself enfolded in arms he had dreamed of for so long, even buried under all the brooding Sturm and a Webley Revolver. He wanted to let go in the embrace of a mother saying everything he had wanted to hear for so long. But next came a wave of guilt, a deep sadness that grinded his teeth. He knew that this had been possible if he had only been able to let go. But he couldn't. Not of his anger, of his hatred of the woman, but to let go of his guilt._

 _He had failed, he had let her down, and he didn't deserve to be here. He didn't deserve to be here in her arms. He didn't deserve to feel safe, warm, or wanted. She had placed her baby's life in his hands, her future, and his future, all of their futures in his hands. And he had failed when she needed him most. For so long he had hated her, darkly brooded on why it had been him, a small child, she chose for that task. But in the end it didn't change the fact that it was him, and he had failed. He wasn't owed anything and he surely didn't deserve this love, especially after all the things he had done tonight, all the things he had done in the long years since._

 _Tears formed in the young man's eyes as he felt the heavenly softness of satin, the warmth of smooth supple flesh, all in a darkening vision. "I'm sorry … I'm sorry!" He sobbed hoarsely in feelings of unworthiness of the security of a mother's protective embrace._

" _No, my darling, it's going to be fine!" He heard her say with a cracked voice of sorrow._

" _I … I tried, I really tried, I tried so hard!"_

" _Don't worry about that, my darling … please, don't …"_

" _All I had to do was run … and I … and I wasn't fast enough. If I was only fast enough!"_

" _Darling, hush, it was not your fault." Her voice broke and he felt moist lips kiss him._

" _She was my responsibility! She was my baby sister … and she's gone! And it's my fault! … It's all my fault! What am I gonna do now? What am I gonna do?!"_

 _His sobs were painful and violent, his whole body shaking. He cried with abandon in his fever not only for a baby sister in the grave. It was for a princess stoned in the town square, the bloodshed in the village below, and for the dozens of people that he had killed since the morning that Cora Talbot was murdered by fate._

" _Mary?!"_

" _Tom! Hurry!"_

" _George?! Oh god … George!"_

" _What? Oh my dear chap!"_

" _Oh Darling!"_

 _The sobbing man was felled upon by gentle but desperate hands. They were silk gloved but the maternal touch was very familiar. He knew his aunt's gentleness from anywhere. Edith had dropped to her knees next to him and was tracing his face gently. He felt the pecks of her lips kiss his forehead and cheeks, her face buried in his chest._

" _It's my fault!" He sobbed weakly._

" _He's lost a lot of blood, he's feverish!"_

" _What happened?! He looks like he was in a battle!"_

" _Well obviously, Edith!"_

" _Not now, Mary! Tom, John, help me get him up and get him downstairs, now!"_

" _It's gonna be alright, Darling, you're gonna be alright!" Edith reassured him with a frightened voice._

" _Edith get his head!"_

 _The man felt himself being lifted away from his mother's protective arms and being hoisted up. Instinctually, he reached a panicked hand out, blind but for little sparks of what looked like shaded flames. He held onto her hand tightly, as tight as he could in his weakened grip._

" _I'm sorry … I'm so sorry!" He sobbed to a woman he could only see in his mind's eye._

" _Darling, please, it wasn't … it wasn't your fault."_

 _Suddenly their hands slipped apart._

They were so close they could hold hands as their mounts raced side by side and stride for stride to the roar of the crowd that cheered by the finish line.

The cold dampness that skimmed off the Highland moors was like a whip when the gale blew off the lake. The painful lash of wet razor felt like it would leave a scar on their faces, but it didn't matter to them. It could leave a thousand cuts that could never heal, and yet they'd be content as long as they bested one another, as long as they won. Horse's hoofs trampled and obliterated thistles in the fields as they pounded and thundered across the late afternoon grey on the fading horizon. Their dashing figures shadowed by the great and gloomy Scottish castle in the distance.

"Stop this madness!"

A voice roared just over the fervor of the crowd that hadn't expected this in the usual dreary Point-to-Point. But as they completed the circuit neither racer cared what Lord Grantham was shouting at them as they stormed by. Both had left the rest of their competition far behind in their passion. To the others they were simply having a noble go of sport, something to give the people a tingle, and for them, something to banter about over the dinner party tonight.

But for Mary and George Crawley this was what a long grudge between mother and son had accumulated into.

Mary was racing without hat and veil for most of the second circuit. Anna's bun had come undone and a fettered lock of dark hair curled moistly on her pale brow. Her riding boots, skin tight pants, and riding jacket was spattered with mud and dampness. Her crop made a cruel sound against the wet hide of her prized nut brown stallion. Her red eyes were wild and intense as she snarled into the frigid wind. She betrayed a gaze next to her.

George was so close to his mother that their knees and thighs knocked and crushed. There was a sort of impotence, almost insult, that George had made his home right at his mother's side. Unlike the country tweed and cream riding trousers of the rest of the racers, George looked completely different. He wore the same black slacks of tough cotton tucked into muddy brown boots. His beaten double breasted leather coat was glistening wetly in the dim light. And the navy blue scarf around his neck was soppy and soggy, whipping heavily behind him. However, under his long wet curls, his eyes were protected by goggles. Something that had gotten him mocked at the starting line, but now Mary wished she had.

The two were completely different in style. Lady Mary was a sportswoman, a proper, refined, and gorgeous athlete in every way. Slender, sleek, and elegant, she was truly cut from marble, and was said by many to have deserved to be carved into Grecian statue as the goddess of the hunt. Lady Mary Crawley was going to break a record of the most won Point-to-Points for a woman today. That was if she could best her own creation.

It was something practically out of "Shelley".

George Crawley was the best racer in the American Southwest, and one of the best in America. His mother may have raced for prestige and pageantry, but George had raced for money, his and others. He rode to survive, to eat that night, next morning, and next week. No amount of equestrian pageantry and hunting family tradition could make up for that type of experience in desperation and purpose. That alone brought a difference in style and attitude to how one cherished winning over style. Even their horses were different. A god of horseflesh of Arabian, Spanish, and Anglo sires, pitted against an American Indian painted Southwestern quarter horse. One was bred for speed to win money for a rider with a powerful need to eat that week. The other was simply bred for perfection, to be admired for its regal majesty.

Both riders' bumped shoulders and crashed their horses against one another as they alone galloped their final lap around the course. They were a quarter mile away from the finish line, away from anyone. It was simply the two, alone, in a vast open of heather and wet turf. Yet they each had tunnel vision, pushing their mounts. But there was something obviously different about this race. In fact, one could assume, this had to do with something much more primal than a simple competition between only parent and only child.

Ten and a half years of pent up resentment and blame stoked an inferno that was raging out of control. Each one blamed the other, each one blamed themselves. It was being cast out of a family home. It was a revolver being placed in a young boy's hand before being sent to a foreign land. It was a boy refusing to come home to spite a mother looking for forgiveness. It was the tears, years, and pieces of soul lost to the night in worry for that boy, her last child. It was the impudent way he smacked her rear end whenever he entered a room while she had her back turned, no matter the place or the company they were in. It was the way she sounded when she talked, and the way he answered back. It was the fact that they loved each other so deeply, so much, that they resented it in the feelings of anger and neglect they projected on one another. All of these feelings were boiled down to a horse race that just ended, but neither realizing it.

In perfect unison they took each obstacle, each jump, together. It was as if they were interconnected, shared the same mind, same impulses. It nearly drove both of them into a rage. They bragged to anyone who would listen how much they weren't alike. But in their fire, when everything else was pushed aside in their mind, they were too much alike for their own good. Each one never entertaining the thought that not only did they have the exact same timing and instincts while mounted, but that it was Lady Mary who had gifted her child these things through his conception inside her. Each synchronized jump, each exact same tick astride, was taken as a slight, an insult. Mary and George Crawley were too much alike to ever think they were anything alike.

And they'd spite God before they'd ever accept reality.

Neither one knew exactly who was too blame, it happened so fast. George claimed that Mary, in her fury, struck at him with her riding crop. Lady Mary claimed that her son reached over to pull her from the saddle. But either way tempers flared to a point of utter madness. They were grappled when both horses took the jump over an obstacle. Both riders where thrown from their mounts, limbs tangled when they hit the ice cold water of a deep creek that the course's track was following. The impact was loud and sucking in their buoyant weight.

George felt as if he had been stabbed repeatedly in the lungs as he lay in the center of the mossy lake mouth. The water below the current was slimy and freezing in the most uncomfortable way. His first thought was that if he didn't get out of there right now, his mother might catch a cold in her chest she couldn't shake. He was happy to find that getting to his feet would bring him waist level to the freezing water. But as he put a hand down on the creek bed to push himself up he felt someone grab his mane of raven curls and dunk his head underneath in a reckless anger.

For the life of him he couldn't understand what was going on. At first he knew that there was no one within a good distance from them. It was impossible for it to be some overzealous helper, too eager to save him. Then, he realized that this person wasn't trying to save him, they were trying to drown him. His mind went straight to a Persian or Turkish Bounty Hunter in the employment of an Ottoman Princess. Then, he worried, not for himself, but for his mother. If the assassin was going to get him, then he'd have to kill Lady Mary as well if he didn't want witnesses.

As George pushed his head up over the Highland creek, he gasped desperately. Then with all his might he drove his elbow back at the person trying to dunk his head underneath. He felt a slender and tight belly's muscles contract and a guttural gasp from a female explode from above him. Quickly, floating, George turned and blindly snapped a hard left cross at his attacker, striking a surprisingly fine and delicate jaw. He heard his attacker hit the creek with a loud splash. Clumsily, water sloshing around him, George struggled to his feet. He threw his goggles away and slicked his long curls back and out of his face. Getting in a fighter's stance to continue the battle, George went from defensive to pure rage with no go between.

Desperately, crawling away through the cold water was Mary, his own mother, cradling her stomach and holding her jaw where George had struck her.

All it took was the adrenaline from self-defense for survival and the realization that his own mother had tried to drown him that sent George into attack. He leapt after Mary, as she tried swimming away from him. He snatched her by the back of her riding trousers and yanked her back hard, ripping the fabric. But she kicked back, knocking him into the water. Getting back to his feet, after wrestling back from under the current, he felt a hard splash near him. A stone from the creek bed had been flung at him with an angry screech from its pitcher. It only incensed George who began advancing with speed toward a beaching Mary.

She had another stone in her hand, her eyes filled with fury and rage. She was about to throw it at George when the young man took a low center of gravity. He charged onto the creek side and propelled his shoulder into her stomach. Grabbing up her slender legs and lifting them off the soggy ground, George drove Mary into the clay.

They sounded like dogs fighting as the two rolled around, Mary's legs wrapped around George's knees, George's hand yanking Mary's bun. Both were snarling and growling as they wiggled and rolled on the cold ground. Till, finally, Mary turned and mounted George. There was so much pain and anger in her eyes that one could hardly recognize who she was at all. But the only thing that was clear was the deep self-loathing she had for herself that externalized in her rage and suffering that was unleashed on the only man in the world she actually loved. Her nails raked across George's cheek, till blood ran down the gashes.

In a blind rage of pain and instinct, George cuffed his hand and smacked it hard against Mary's ear. She let out a pained scream and placed a protective hand over her damaged appendage. Then with a growl of a young fighter pushed to the edge, George pushed his mother's face hard. The two rolled over again, tilled this time George mounted Mary. He ripped her shirt open with a hand that took control of her. Then, with a ring of drawn Spanish steel, the fighting ended.

Red tinted eyes reflected the long, double edged, Apache Knife hovering over them. George looked practically rabid, in the throes of feral madness, as he pinned Mary to the sod. His blade was ready to be driven into her cold heart.

For Lady Mary's part she was having a massive temper tantrum. She was lashing out, having a petty fight in the way that women did with others. She pulled hair, she scratched, and she threw things in her anger. But in seven years exile to a society that was nearly toppled, in company of desperate people who would do anything to survive, George Crawley didn't know the definition of a 'petty fight'. He had never been a party to a fight or an ambush that didn't start with someone trying to kill him. It was his, by instinct, to defend himself by the reality of a world he was still apart of though he was back home. When he registered that someone was trying to drown him, mother or not, petty tantrum or not, he could not control what was instinct …

And that was to kill to protect himself and what was his.

The young man, for a long moment, looked like he'd do it. The doubled edged Spanish steel looked like a razor sharp icicle that was melting off the edge of a roof. It was gonna fall, it was going to hurt someone, and it was just a matter of when. George's eyes were wide and murderous, his chest heaving, his hand pinning Mary by her balled up silk blouse shook with fear and anger. Their breath frothed together, nearly fogging their sight of one another. Mary looked absolutely terrified as she lay helplessly submissive under her only child who was moments from murdering her.

With a primal roar, the young rider drove his knife down with aggression. Mary looked to be in complete shock as she turned to see the silvery blade impaled deeply into the clay next to her head. Slowly, George's shaking hands released her balled silken shirt. It was the look of fear on his mother's face. The same look she had when Cora was dying, and the same look that she had when she asked him to save the baby, to save her from that awful helplessness. It occurred to him in those deadly few seconds that was the moment that led to this one. And it was to his everlasting shame to see that it had been him that made her relive that fear again.

A nasty yellowing bruise was already forming on Mary's jaw and four bloody scratches smeared red on George's cheek. They saw themselves there, what they looked like. Soaking wet, Mary's clothing torn and both covered in muck. Slowly, with emotional wheezes, George squeezed his eyes shut and began to tremble at all that happened. Wordlessly, he fell upon his mother with a light flop. He lowered his head and buried his face into Mary's satin brassier and cried. Meanwhile, Mary just lay there looking to the sky. A single tear touched the pale cheek of a woman that had never looked more mortified and ashamed in her life to be within her own skin, to know what she had done, and what they had done in their anger.

They didn't forgive themselves for what happened that day, but they knew now just how far the pain, the rot, of a decade long wound truly went.

" _We need to clean the wound … get soap and fresh towels."_

 _A young man's head was swimming. He wasn't sure where he was and what had happened. There was a sense of familiarity to his surroundings. The wooden surface under him was coded with something powdery. But there was a warmth that touched his exposed skin. He found that he was shirtless and there were faces, familiar faces, buzzing in his dimmed sight. He smelt strong aromas of baked goods and sweet treats and they all made him gag after hours in the rain soaked countryside. The richness of the flavor was blanketing his senses and he felt like he couldn't breathe. An amusing notion took his head for a moment of how ironic it would be for him to have died suffocating on vanilla cake._

"Call …"

"What?!"

There was a rip-roar of laughter in the Servant's Hall at the girl's reaction. The mockery drew Sybbie Branson from the kitchen island and storming back in outrage. She was quite the spectacle with her long flowing white and silver evening gown. Her long tresses of black curls were waved to perfection with a white rose within it. The teenage girl's beauty had a near stained glass perfection tonight. That was, if you could imagine an Arthurian Lady that had a slice of vanilla cake hanging out of her mouth. Her bare feet padded up to a table full of senior staff. A young JJ Bates was sitting next his father's, partnering in the game as they scrutinized their hand. Mrs. Baxter seemed unreadable as she pushed in more chips, her fiancé Mr. Mosley sweating next to her, whispering caution. Meanwhile Anna Bates held her little girl in her lap, brushing her hair, while the small girl brushed her dolly's dark ringlets in turn. It was a gift from Miss Sybbie and Miss Marigold, her name was Lady Sybbie Marigold, and she loved the toy more than anything in the world.

But when Anna looked up she glared in disapproval. "Oh, Miss Sybbie, don't ruin your dress!" She sighed in exasperation. "It took us half the afternoon getting you just right for your portrait session." She complained at the icing that was inching ever closer to the gorgeous sequence design below her ivory cleavage. The girl rolled her eyes, not even using a plate or fork as she ate the slice by hand.

"Bu' I'm ungery!" Sybbie whined with a mouthful.

"You just got done eating dinner." George Crawley replied lifting and dropping his chinking poker chips thoughtfully as he gave playfully suspicious glares at a cat like Mrs. Baxter who was smirking into her tea.

The girl glared at her best friend. "You call that dinner? Lobster cakes the size of six pence with weird orange sauce?" She asked rhetorically with disgust.

"Last time I checked, I would call that a very fine dinner, thank you!" Mrs. Patmore's disembodied voice boomed from the kitchen crossly. Sybbie covered her mouth to stifle the surprised laugh that nearly burst forth at the slip up.

"It was good, Mrs. Patmore!"

"Aye, says Oliver Twist at the cauldron!"

George just snorted and shook his head while everyone else smiled with looks of pure endearing love for the girl with the flower in her hair and bare feet. She casually and comfortably walked amongst them like they were family. When she took another bite, Anna, with annoyance, pointed the hairbrush at the beauty as if it was a whip.

"No one is saying you can't eat, but for the love of Christmas, get a plate!" She chastised shaking her head.

"Yeah, or we'll get a camera and send the picture to all of the suitors mom has lined up for you." George threatened as he raised the stakes of the poker game by placing a stack of chips into the 'pot'. "And in big bold letters we'll write on the back "Good luck with that" …" His chips chinked to the sound of amused chuckles around the table.

Sybbie frowned as she took another ravenous bite of her treat. " 'ou prowmise?" she asked again with her mouthful, as if making a statement by the unlady like action.

Mrs. Hughes suddenly emerged from her office. She had her coat on her arm and a hat on her head. She seemed older now than George remembered her being. Though he wasn't sure if that was the usual wear and tear of a middle aged woman after eight years or what being married to Charlie Carson does to a woman after eleven. But either way he couldn't help but feel at home around the stern Scottish woman.

"I'm going home for the night, Mr. Barrow." She announced to the Butler who had a cigarette in his mouth and a pair of cards in hand. He seemed unimpressed with Master George's posturing, giving frowning eyes toward the young man next to him tauntingly looking through a catalogue to see what he was going to buy with the money he was about to win off his oldest friend.

"Good night, Mrs. Hughes." He replied.

It was a Friday night tradition that started with Master George's return. It began with just Sybbie, Thomas and George. But soon, after a while, Mrs. Baxter joined. Then there had come Mr. Bates and Mrs. Bates. Though, Anna only watched to make sure that Mr. Bates didn't get in over his head with his bets. Soon it became a little get together that bonded the staff. In a strange way, after all these years of working together, it felt more like a get together with family than colleagues. Especially after Mr. Bates and Anna brought their little ones along. It even more cemented the staff of Downton Abbey as the many aunts and uncles that the young Bates children lacked in blood. Whatever divisions had come between the family when it came Master George's return, it bred nothing but fondness and unity downstairs for the servants.

All it took was one look from Mrs. Hughes and one would've thought that Sybbie was playing Russian roulette. "Oh, no you will not, young lady!" She said sternly. "For heaven sake, girl, go get a fork and plate!" She snapped maternally at the teenage girl. "March!" She pointed back to the kitchen.

"Ugh!" Sybbie groaned. "Why can't I have my cake?!" She complained with a whine as she turned in a huff.

"When you learn to eat it like a Lady, and not a pack mule!" She took her hat and swatted the girl on the rear end as she stomped back into the kitchen. But she tried to hide the loving smirk when Sybbie made a donkey noise in reaction from the kitchen.

She shook her head fondly. "Good night, Master George." She said, placing a hand on the teenager's shoulder.

"Night, Mrs. Hughes." He replied flipping a page loudly in the catalogue to bait a shrewd Thomas who was blowing thoughtful smoke rings. But his impish smirk turned to an annoyed scowl when he felt the older woman grab a hold of his loose pony tail of curls.

"I assume you know a barber." She chastised.

"No, but I assume you do." He pushed his hair from his eyes with a sigh at the constant comments people had been giving his lack of upkeep in fashion.

He may have been richer than Cresses, with the Metro Museums lease on the African Ruby. But, even then, he still donned his cowboyish, worn, clothing. With a beaten leather jacket and supple boots he had brought from America. Moreover, and just to torment his Donk and mother, he still refused to cut his hair. More than a few people had commented that he looked like an American Indian … or what they imagined they look like.

"I know someone. She's quite good with scissors." She said lightly with disapproval of his rugged look in the very suggestion of her voice.

George snorted. "I'd hope so, her being a barber and all." He raised his brows.

Mrs. Hughes ruffled the boy's long raven curls as she left. "I never said she was a barber." The housekeeper left with a mysteriously threatening whimsy in her voice.

Anna was smiling as she braided her daughter's hair. "I'd be careful not to fall asleep around here Master George. You might wake up to find yourself sheered for the summer." She shared a chuckle with Mr. Bates.

"Droll, Anna, very droll." He rolled his eyes with a ghosted smirk.

Padding confidently back through the kitchen, Sybbie returned with a small plate, fork, and a new piece of cake. There was a teasing mockery to her chanting in Latin as she held up the plate of cake like she was leading a holy procession to a Vatican altar. Anna rolled her eyes at the girl while her daughter giggled in her lap. Then, seeing George's feet crossed and up on the table, leaning on the back legs of his chair, she dumped herself into his lap hard. He made a surprised and startled noise as his chair fell forward and his legs slipped from the table with a thunderous clap. A growl accompanied a hateful glare that was directed at the innocent girl who sucked the icing off her fork while lounging across his lap.

"Call, jerk." He said with annoyance.

Sybbie picked up her abandoned hand of cards that George had been guarding. Then she smiled placing them back down on the table. She cut her cake from her plate. "Welp .." She announced forking the cake piece. She shoved it in George's mouth before he shouted at her to quit screwing around and place a bet. He glared at her as she ate another piece. Then, with a bragging smirk, she pushed all her chips in.

"Here's your chance to get out now, boyous, cause this game is about to get amazing."

 _A numbed ache suddenly pulled George out of the revelry, his glazed eyes staring out at the shadow of the Servant's hall in the distance. In the searing pain that followed he was, for a moment, sober again. George Crawley immediately tried to sit up, but he was held down by more than a few hands. He was a mask of panic and fire, remembering being in a fight with Nazi pilots. He struggled against the hands that held him down, grabbing a hold of someone and pushing them off him. There was a loud clatter of the content on Mrs. Patmore's desk being pushed off by a landing body._

" _George! George, it's all right, you're alright!" Tom was shouting at him._

" _Get the hell off me you goose stepping bastard!" the ace pilot snarled gripping an older man in tails that he didn't know by the throat and squeezed with an impossible hard iron vice. The man gasped and choked, wheezing desperately for help. He heard a woman gasp at such the violent sight._

" _George, Let him go, it's alright! You're at Downton!" Lord Grantham yelled in alarm as sets of restraining hands pried George off of the Lord of Acorn Hall's throat. The older man fell to the floor gasping. He was attended to quickly by Mrs. Baxter._

" _Master George, it's us, calm down. You're out of the fight!" Mr. Bates shouted. The older man wrapped his arms around the younger in a restraining choke hold, while more people came to hold the young fighter down. In the struggle a hand got loose and he struck the nearest person to him. He heard someone hit the floor hard._

" _M'Lord!" Mrs. Hughes gasped in surprise but not distress._

" _I'll take all of you!" George shouted with rage._

" _Is Lord Cinderhill gonna be alright, Mrs Hughes?"_

" _I don't think he killed him, no … but I dare say the lad is not gonna be in the boxing ring anytime soon, Your Lordship."_

 _The pain in his shoulder intensified, which only drove George to fight harder, not hearing anything beyond a blur of words and shadowy images. Suddenly someone blocked out the light in his eyes. Their slender hands were covered in silk as they forced him to look straight forward._

" _Darling, my darling, I want you to look at me!" The voice was girlish and cutesy, it was not accented the same as everyone else. It was more refined but carried the same regional way of speaking as George. And it was the kindest, warmest, voice that he had ever known._

 _Lady Grantham's face was shadowed and he couldn't see her in his dimmed vision. But he felt his granny's touch, smelt her familiar perfume, and heard her stern but loving voice already massage his nerves. He didn't know where he was, but he knew that it was somewhere safe, even for a moment, as long as his granny was there. He felt her silk covered fingers twirl the curls on the side of his head, hair he inherited from her, a tick she was fond of doing when he was a child sitting on her knee._

" _Listen to my voice, darling …" She said calmly. "You're safe …" She kept trying to pound into his fevered mind. He shook his head in protest, but Cora only nodded even more._

" _Yes, you are, nothing bad is gonna happen to you anymore. I won't let it!"_

Lady Grantham had been hosting a retreat for upper class ladies and their daughters as the head of a societal committee in York. Many country and London houses of the Peerage were now filled with the teenage generation of 'War Babies'. Cora Crawley, overwhelmed with teenagers herself, decided that now was a perfect time to strength the bonds between mothers and daughters. It sounded completely stupid to Sybbie, but then everything sounded stupid when you're forced at gun point to attend. With Downton threatened to be overrun with teenage girls, Robert Crawley, saw it as a perfect time to go fill his parliament seat in London for a time.

But George knew there was another agenda when he came knocking at Grantham House. Lord Grantham asked that George, for a few weeks, take up the running of Downton while he was away. The boy immediately and flatly refused. A long argument turned boiling hot to frigidly cold seemingly at random from that point. Robert had been tired of having his and Cora's invitation for family functions scorned with "I have better things to do." Robert impressed upon George that he was needed at the house as a form of guardian to a manor filled with high born young women out in the middle of the country, some for the first time. They were vulnerable and in needing of a famed hero to protect them for some novelty. However, Lord Grantham wasn't amused when that same famed hero replied that maybe he was the villain they should be protected from. He mentioned organizing a hunt, which had been encouraging to Lord Grantham, till George said that he had just reread the "The Most Dangerous Game" and had always wanted a chance to shoot at a tilted lady. And it would be a perfect chance to find "His most worthy advisory in his very own Drawing Room". Finally, when Robert's patience's was completely non-existent with the young rebel, he made a mistake in pointing out that as Viscount of Downton Abbey the manor house was technically George's by right …

In an olive branch after very heated words between Lord and Heir, Robert Crawley had never made a bigger mistake in his life.

What was a bed time scheme between a married couple to round up some pretty young suitors for their grandson, back fired majorly when Lord Grantham gave the keys to the Kingdom for a test drive to the eventual heir of all. Most grievous of these mistakes was that he put his name to writing on a document that George and Sybbie drew up without reading it.

At first Lady Grantham had been thrilled, that for the first time in a decade, George was going to sleep in Downton. Her happiness even brushed aside the suggestive jokes of him taking 'what was his by right of conquest' when he saved the staff trouble of setting a room up, by setting his duffel in Lady Grantham's room. Though, Edith had been warning that setting George loose on Downton Abbey and a successful retreat of a dozen mothers with their teenage daughters were never going to be mutually exclusive. Lady Grantham didn't care. She had everything planned out …

And not one of them ever came true.

George showed up only to breakfast, mostly so he could embarrass Lady Mary with a pop to her rear when he entered the room. That was the prologue to the sniping and fighting of Mary having to be down at breakfast in the first place. This would be when she accused that George shouldn't be at the breakfast table at all, because, he had already eaten breakfast … hers! A crime that Anna and Mr. Barrow would never confirm nor deny every morning when she pulled open the metal cover to find everything eaten or picked at on her plate. Mary knew, she knew! That George and Sybbie were doing it just to tick her off. It was embarrassing, but was an amusing morning's entertainment for their guests to see Mary accuse coldly from across the table, while George ate a bacon, egg, cheese, and toast sandwich with obnoxious crunches. The tittering laughter from the girls and the shit eating look on their 'dreamy' hero's face only made it worse.

And then, George would disappear for the rest of the day.

He took to his masculine and patriarchal privileges as Lord of the Manor as a corrupt politician did favors. He locked himself into the small library for hours at a time, pouring over medieval maps and ancient books of lore on the Holy Land and Spain. He ate Luncheon, Tea, and Dinner with the Servants. When Lady Grantham came down to ask George if he'd like to at least join the ladies in the Drawing Room she'd find him playing cards, laughing, and joking with his staff of butler, footmen, and maids rather than with 'their' guests. In fact, anytime Cora wanted to suggest that George guide a tour of the gardens or come take some tea, he never seemed to be around. She was becoming sure that Thomas was tipping him off and that he was hiding from her.

So she'd send Rose, Rachel, or, god forbid, Sybbie to go find him. But then they'd disappear for hours and return guiltily (Except for Sybbie) to say that they had found George, but ended up staying with him, rather than returning with him. It was the only thing that kept her from exploding on her grandson. He might have been ignoring their guests, but he wasn't ignoring the family. Though she never saw George till he came to bed, she could hear the giggles of Rachel from afar, or look out the window from the library and see the young man napping under a tree with his bed pillowed on Sybbie's bum. She even couldn't find reason to yell or chastise him at night. Though he had endlessly teased and prodded Robert, he took one thing very seriously.

He guarded all of them like a bird of prey in the evenings.

Darkness crept slowly as the night hours fell with black drapes over the homely view of the Yorkshire countryside from all windows of the old manor house. Lamps were set low by tired servants as the night dragged on. A deep hollow silence filled the countryside with a religious sanctity. There was not a breeze, or even a whisper to be heard through the creaking branches. There was a blue stain in the darkening Yorkshire sky, a layered cake of the star spray on top of the last azure reflected in dark clouds on the horizon. Then it seemed that all light had left the world.

It was somewhere in the tail end of those ominous hours that George Crawley finally returned to Downton.

The boy had his leather coat collar pulled up, his scarf wrapped and folded snuggly around his neck, and his boots scuffed by nature. A hunting shotgun's butt was wrested on George's shoulder, his hand haphazardly gripping it by the barrel as he entered the large manor from the ancient double doors with a loud creaking and clank. He looked thoughtful and alert as he locked the door behind him. Next, he closed the glass doors. Once again he locked them behind him, drawing shutters. The architect of the brilliant "Amantha defense perimeter", built by the "Runaways" in New Orleans against Klan trackers, would make sure no one was getting inside Downton Abbey that wasn't invited.

But now returned to the manor, stepping inside always brought a true contrast that always grated George's nerves when it happened.

Since the teenage hero had agreed to stay on for a few weeks, he had spent evenings in the deep quiet of nocturnal nature. Most of the hours were spent crouched or sitting behind a tree in the woods, mostly in the dark. He watched the village perimeter, the gap between the separating wire fence of Downton's property and the woods. Each night, a shotgun at the ready, his revolver on his back hip, and his knife at his side, he watched and listened from the shadows of the forest. Always waiting for ghosts to show up, a thug in white bed sheets, a mustached man with a sombrero and Colt revolver, or a mercenary with a Pinkerton's badge that didn't stop the hunt till the contract was filled. No one was quite sure which war George Crawley thought he was fighting when he went out there each evening. But he was determined that the ghosts never touch the women and girls he loved that knew nothing of it.

But now that he entered the manor, finished with the last patrol, he shouldered his Donk's shotgun and turned to find a few parties of woman in their finery chattering. He went from the churchly quiet of nature to the bustle of a dozen gossiping prized hens and their pretty little chicks. The cricket's song was suddenly replaced by a record player belting out jazz over the haughty, fake, laughter. In these hours, George Crawley valued quiet and solitude. At Grantham House, his house, they had it. His grandma Isobel quietly crocheted while watching the window as she waited for a son that would never come home. And by the fire, George brooded, watching the flames dance in a trance. Suffering quietly in a helpless sorrow of watching a woman he loved most in the world waist away, lost in memories of a time when everyone was happy …

It was a time before he existed.

George began trudging quietly toward the stairs. He'd take an early night, rather than get wrapped in all of these peacocks' nonsense. Silently, unnoticed mostly, the teen walked through the lobby, he was lost in his own world. In this hour of the night, there was always an unwanted reflection of the many ills of a world he had lived in for so long. They were mistakes, wrongs, tragedies, and broken hearts all in places with names that no one in this room would know or care to know. But he would.

In his quiet melancholy he felt his heart beat faster and his chest numb. It was an old feeling that once had given him exhilaration, now it only provided sadness. Old dreams shattered into deadly shards that silently move ever closer to his heart that calls one name with every pump of blood, of life. And he didn't need to know where she was, this angel of the heavens. But, he knew that she was staring right at him. He told himself that he wouldn't look, that he couldn't. It would be the death of him at this time of night. But like Orpheus before him, George could not, not, look back at her in this journey through hell of someone else's making. He'd damn her as he'd damn himself, but by god …

He had to see her.

Marigold was sitting with Rose. She wore a folding golden dress with padded nylon bust and golden silk gloves. Her long golden hair was satiny and brushed till it seemed that there was a halo caught in the half light of the lobby around her head. She was practically shimmering, glowing, easily the most beautiful creature that had ever seen the inside of the Abbey. But her green eyes, infused with the light and grace of a saint, pushed away all the darkness that always misted George Crawley's steps. He was caught in their ethereal light, blinding him from anything else in the room but her.

They didn't say anything, they didn't move. They were so close to one another that they could touch and yet fate had placed them so far away that the two lived in completely different universes. There was not a proper word that could describe the young and forbidden love that sparked between the two. They were both lonely and tragic children that were drawn together, compelled to forever be at one another's side, to make up for what life had set back for the other. For so long they were all each other had wanted. They had so many plans. But now all they could do was stare from afar with pain of an impossible love that could not be extinguished.

A single tear fell from Marigold's eye, knowing how much pain George was in, how much mental anguish the last eight years had caused him. But she couldn't go to him, she couldn't comfort him, love him the way that biology had assigned and fate had scorned. She died a little inside each time she saw the boy in the distance. She watched him each day falling, little by little, to a dark sorrow, all the while knowing that she could only make it worse. It took all George had not to hold her, to love her. He squeezed his eyes shut, while Marigold quietly wiped the tear from her cheek, their Aunt Rose wordlessly rubbing her arm with a frown of sympathetic confusion.

"So is there anything out there, _Your Lordship_?"

George opened his eyes, giving one last look at Marigold who got up to excuse herself. He watched her go with a visibly heavy heart. Then, he smirked grimly with the deepest distain unhidden on his handsome face. The voice belonged to the world's most punchable of punchable faces. He turned to the coldly haughty and sarcastic voice made of regal velvet that you wanted to worship, and longed to whisper such poetry in your ears.

Lady Mary Crawley was sitting behind George with a party of women. They were the usual hangers on, Lady Mary groupies that wanted into all the exclusive places. With the prospect of never being the Countess of Grantham, and tired of being lorded over by her sister, the Marchioness, Lady Mary paved a new path. As a business woman and model, a very successful one, she opened new lanes in society by befriending the movers and shakers of everything fashion and entertainment. Mary Crawley had tapped into the pulse of the up and coming in popularity and made herself a gate keeper between the Aristocracy and the artistry. If you were a duchess's daughter who needed the right Wedding Dress, you paid homage to Lady Mary Crawley. She'd always know where to send you, that is, if she likes you. Once again, Edith might have been her social better, but she was not as popular as Mary. Her status was clearly reflected in her dress.

It was glamorous in a way that was many steps ahead of the other evening gowns around them. It wasn't a secret what George's mother had been doing in Hollywood in the few months that she had been there. And it wasn't visiting her son several states over. It was a priceless white gown, with a toga cut that had a Grecian flare, especially for her cleavage. Her hair was done up with golden pin shaped like olive branches. It was daring, arrogant, and she was simply pulling it off in a way that no one could think possible. All that seemed to be missing was a throne to sit this goddess of mythology upon …

And for her child to actually care.

"Nothing worth taking a pop at." George grunted dismissively as moved to continue on.

The woman gave her child a sly look. It was something akin to a coy, knowing, quid-pro-quo secret between them of what she thought was really going on. It made George's blood boil. His mother honestly thought that his going out every night to guard the perimeter was some sort of show, a routine, aimed at impressing all of the girls and their mothers. She thought this was all some sort of Play Theater to live up to what his Aunt Edith had published in her magazine. All of the women in her party smirked and giggled on cue, desperately falling over one another to follow their goddess's lead. It was everyone but Sybbie. The girl, in a dress that was the same as her mama but more modest in the cleavage area, shook her head sympathetically. It was a silent warning for George not to engage.

Nodding at Sybbie, gritting his teeth to bite down on his anger, George just jumped the gun stock on his shoulder and shook his head. But before he left, the young man turned and gave her a look of utter disgust.

"What it must be like to be you." He replied crossly in sarcasm and began to walk away.

"I couldn't imagine would you would shoot at." She said with a snobbish volley that was deeply condescending, giving a knowing look to the other women and girls who remained at the late hour. Soon the entire foyer was watching, hearing the contention and bite in mother and son's voices.

"Mama …" the little whine in Sybbie's voice was low and pleading with innocence.

"Mary, don't …!" Rose said under her breath.

But there was something in the look of contempt and disgust that George had for her, the way his alien voice, so unlike the rest of them, lashed her soul. Her red eyes were contemptuous and full of vengeful passion. No one, in her life, had ever looked at her and talked to her in that way. To gaze upon her with such vile, as if she was something wrong. And it was driven more by the fact that it was how she felt every time she saw George. He was ever a reminder that she had done something vile and horrible to him when he was a small child. And when she saw the way he looked at her, Mary felt it was all piling on her, till she couldn't breathe. So she lashed out.

George was smirking again, smirking in a way that Mary hated. It made her feel so stupid, so ignorant. There was a mirthful chuckle as he swung Robert's shotgun down and placed the stock on the ground at his side. He nodded as he glanced around at the crowd of titled and coroneted ladies. For a long moment he looked at them, really, looked at them. And all he could do was shake his head in utter contempt. When he was done he took a step forward till he was looming over his mother.

He motioned all around them. "This whole country, most towns and cities since Granny got here, they went mechanized. Then, after the war, they doubled down on it. See, Mom, that's where all the money was, in factories and plants, in industrialization. I remember walking around this village when I was little, and everyone talking about how any smart young man should go to a mill, a factor. It was more money, and they'd take care of you more than a Lord will with a dingy cottage on the Estate's back nine. So you can only imagine what happened when Wall Street fell and they shut down the mills, the factories, and plants first." He looked at all of them like they were insects. "The people in Ripon, in, uh, Thirsk, they've got no jobs. They're starving!" He snarled at an emotionless mother who didn't even blink. "Tell me, mom, do you know what it's like to stand for hours in a bread line? Do you know what it's like praying that there's something left to feed your kids for the next couple of days?"

"No …" Mary sipped her bubbly. But suddenly George swatted it out of her hand. The glass chipped on the floor, spilling half its liquid on the rug. It caused several of their guests to gasp and few more to move back instinctually.

"George!" Rose said reaching for him. But the youth didn't pay attention and neither did Mary. The woman only challenged her child more by shifting closer to him defiantly.

"No …" George parroted his mother with a snarl. "No, but there are thousands of people out there that do, and every day it's worse. The people out there are scared, they're hungry, and they're bitter. Every day vagabonds from Ripon and Thirsk come wandering into the village, looking for some work on the farms. Most of them haven't eaten in days, their children picking nimbly bits from acorns on the side of the country roads. And when they get here, and sometime after the shop owners threaten to beat a begging father's head in, the man and his ragged children get to see a bunch of dumb, giggly, daughters of Lords prancing around in their fancy dresses. They watch them astride their expensive horses, better fed than them, ride around the countryside. See them dressed up in diamonds for five course dinners! Do you know what that looks like to someone who hasn't eaten in five days? Do you know what it's like to see young, pretty, women that look like a million bucks strut around this place like nothing's happened?"

"I can't say that I have."

"It makes you desperate! It makes you bitter, and angry, and dangerous. Do you know what happens when people's children are starving and they can't do anything about it?"

"I assume …"

"They riot!" George roared in Mary's face with utter disgust of everyone in his house, everyone who came to his Granny's 'retreat' with holiday on the mind to the countryside.

"But, they don't do it at first, and not right away." George continued. "First, they send a man, maybe two, and they watch the house. They want to see what's guarding it, and who's guarding it. In America it was usually detectives. Private Police filled to the gills with old timers that retired from the force, making insurance, used to doing things with a club the hard way, back when justice came with a swing of an arm in a dark alley. But here in England, you don't have guards. You think that just because you've ruled this land for centuries, that it the way it's always gonna be."

"So they send their men out there and they scope the place out. Then, when they figure they've got a butler, maybe a footman, a lord, they think that they like those odds. That it's worth the risk. They'll rip this place off down to the wall paper. Any one of this useless bullshit could buy food for a month. So they come with sticks, pipes, and sickles and they storm this place. They kill the servants, first, because, they're traitors to their class. They kill the Lord, the man they blame for all of this suffering …" George held back on his rant hard when it came to what was the women's fate. He swallowed and then just shook his head.

"You haven't been in a riot, you haven't seen what people will do when their blood is high and their stomach is empty." Was all George would comment about the point he left hanging unanswered. "You're here, laughing, drinking, and gossiping with the rest of your high class nonsense. All the while it just takes one. It takes one moment when you say something wrong, when you look at a dirty child with condescending sympathy, all it takes is one man, one purpose, and one desperate idea. And when he finds his way to those woods out there and he slips by that fence. You're gonna hope that someone was out there, someone who took off that dirt merchant's ear or hand. Someone who did a bit of Shotgun work to give him something to think about when he tells his buddies about what's waiting at a manor house filled with such reckless, arrogant, extravagance ready to be taken from a bunch of dumb sheep in diamonds!"

Before George was finished he kicked the shotgun up and snatched it smoothly in Mary's face to make his point. It was clear in his eyes, to anyone who knew him that something had flashed in his mind. There was experience to this, to some great tragedy which fueled this rant. To those who loved him, they knew that it might have come out harshly, but that it came from a place of love, an intense love for them. Nightmares that plague a young man that something similar might happen. But to Lady Mary, who deep down felt a scarlet shame, and was thoroughly humiliated once more in front of everyone who was anyone …

She saw it as a weakness.

"Well …" She drew out. "Ladies …" She turned to their guests in grand fashion. "We can all sleep safely tonight knowing that the heroic George Crawley is guarding the perimeter tonight." There was never a more biting sweetness in her silken voice as she tilted her head with a look of pure ice. "It's just a comfort to know that he's protecting all of us from an evil voodoo shaman, Klansmen, Mexican Bandits, and Pinkerton mercenaries …" There was never a meaner spirit than the way Mary Crawley shrugged a single creamy shoulder. "And Ming The Merciless." She added with jovial mocking that had a deep rancor buried underneath it that George felt right down to his toes upon its impact.

It was clearly a neon sign that Mary, George's mother, still refused to believe that most of the things that happened to her son, actually happened. She couldn't allow herself to believe, even for a second, that they were true. To believe them would mean that they had actually happened, that her child, her only child, who she thought she had been saving, had been exiled to that existence. And worse, it would be all her fault. So, Mary made it a joke, undermined Edith and George at every turn. She'd introduce doubt to every story published and told by George or his friends. Mary was never ready to face that possibility that she had made a grievous mistake that hurt her child not once, but twice, so badly that it scarred him forever.

For a long moment, under an uncomfortable titter of laughter, it looked like George could rip Mary's throat out. The only thing that could hurt worse than actually being stabbed in the heart was the mockery, the denial, of all the hardships George had faced by his mother. His eyes broke for a moment, but he just shook his head in recovery.

"Well … if one of those imaginary, angry, desperate people come in to stab a hole in your belly, and let the stray dogs rip out and feast on your bowels … don't expect me to get up for you." George's look was like an angry red hot iron and directed at Mary. At the vivid imagery that was spoken by George, there was a horrified look on some of the older women's faces.

"What a horrid thing to say, George!" Sybbie blurted out.

The young man turned vengefully on her. "You're right, it's pretty awful." He said darkly. "But it doesn't beat the horror of seeing it happen first hand." He snapped and then left.

He didn't bother to turn around to see the expression on their faces. It wasn't something that he cared for. And as he left the silent lobby, he felt a deep guilt for ever voicing those parting words. But every night, he couldn't shake the imagery. Whenever his legs were tired, when he was bored to death out there in the dark, he remembered the Garden District in New Orleans. Then he refocused on the shadows of the night and his heart.

When he entered his Granny's bedroom, he found her sitting in bed, book open. Cora Crawley's hair was in a tight braid over a bare shoulder that pushed down a thin strap of her short nylon slip. She didn't look at George, or at least tried not to. If she had, he expected it would be with a deep disapproval. It could be for many things. His roommate had displayed a tendency for being snippy when he didn't knock. There had been a few times, recently, which he had casually walked in on her in garter and satin knickers. But George didn't flinch, care, stare, or look away. It was nothing he had hadn't seen before.

He still remembered when he was little, before baby Cora died, and after Sybbie and Marigold were gone. It was a time when the last nannies and nurses had left with the girls, a Turkish bounty not worth getting in front of, even for a future Lord of Grantham. In those days little George's bath time coincided with his Granny's. He still remembered how they sat in the warm, bubbly, tub. Mostly forgotten by his family, he cherished those shared bath times. He could still hear her heart beating when he'd turn and lay his tiny head against her chest, feeling the warm slickness of her soft skin against his cheek. He remembered how she'd lounge back in the porcelain, water sloshing gently, her arms wrapped around his tiny body as they soaked quietly in the tub. When he closed his eyes he could still fell the serenity of the whisper of her voice in his ear while she stroked his little wet blond curls, humming a song.

It was beyond the fact that Sybbie had no issue changing right in front of him, so much so, she constantly did it. George had delivered Rose's baby, much less seen her naked more than was probably healthy over the years. He was forced, by necessity, to shower with his Aunt Edith in a high school locker room while on the run from the State Police in Memphis. A card game for movie tickets and lingerie ads in fashion magazines had ensured early eye cancer for George on the front of seeing Lady Mary's sleek body. So it was that nude or scantily clad female family members didn't seem to bother George one way or the other. He treated it as he would male members, as few as they were.

But he knew that was why his granny was cross with him.

It was little things he noticed. Her robe on the floor, pooled just behind the vanity chair, a strap hanging over it. A picture frame of his Donk before shipping out to South Africa tipped over. And the sheets tossed over. Either his Granny was doing something he didn't want to think about with his Grandfather's picture before she heard him coming, or she had been watching from the overlook. She heard what he had said down there, to his mother and the rest of the sheep. He knew that she wanted to say something to him. Their relationship wasn't like Sybbie, Marigold, Rachel, and little Hughes. Cora didn't smother George with grandmotherly love, a pelting of kisses and hugs. She was sterner with him, serious, and more direct. The love was just as pure, but had more investment beyond the spoiling affection that a grandmother longed to give with abandon. In the absence of Mary taking responsibility, and Isobel dying, Cora was effectively the teenage kid's only parent. And she treated George as such, every day seeing him as if he had been pulled from her womb himself. He wasn't her grandchild in her mind …

George was _her_ child.

He stared at her as he undid his jacket buttons. Her matching dark blue eyes peeked over a novel she wasn't reading. She didn't say anything as he walked over and fixed her robe. He removed his jacket and hung it on her coat rack. He turned back to Cora, only to find that she had quickly glanced back at her book. He slipped the ends from the slot of the folded scarf and pulled it off. She watched him wrap it around his hand and then place it on her hope chest. By this time Cora had sat up in bed, pulling her nightgown straps back up. George had unbuckled his weapon's belt and had placed it on his Donk's end table. But when Cora opened her mouth, nothing came out. He sat on Robert's side of the bed, his back to her. She watched the obscured view of George pulling his boots off. But when she nestled back into her spot and reached to turn off her light, her boy sighed.

"Her name was a Madeline Johnson St. Pierre. Her father's name was Lorenzo, he was the Reverend at the Church on Lafayette Square …" He started.

"I remember the church, not the reverend's name. I was a flower girl at my Aunt's first wedding. She got married in that church." Cora cut him off. There was nostalgia in her voice. "It used to scare me. It was the way the steeple was designed." She added.

"It's not there anymore, Hurricane, 1906."

"Too bad, gave it character."

"Yeah …" George cleared his throat. "The Klan's raids were starting to pick up, with precision. The Lynching Mobs were starting to know where they're victims were gonna be and when they'd get there. So we dug around and found out that all of the victims were being helped by that church's missionary programs …" George paused for a long time, he made as if to turn back to look at Cora under the sheets, but he didn't. She lay on her hip, head propped up by an arm, and hand absently smoothing the soft bedspread while she watched George in the lamp light.

"We, uh …" He hesitated. "We tied the Reverend to a chair and we asked him which name he gave to that bull head wearing monster and the Klu Klux Klan. We asked and beat on him, and asked, and beat on him. We did this for fifteen hours, till there wasn't a hole on his face that wasn't bleeding." He waited for his Granny to sound disappointed, to be outraged. But the daughter of a woman murdered by these men, only quietly listened.

"Finally, he gave us a name. It was a farm just on the edge of the Le Blanc fork. The farmer had stolen a chicken off the side of the road, his family was starving. He had given the church a bushel of eggs in thanks. And for that they were going to hang him, for his crime of stealing to feed his children and being black." George cleared his throat. "We saddled up and moved to break it up. But by the time we got there, the Klansmen had hung the father and the two youngest children. All that was left was the eldest son and the mother …" His voice broke for a moment. "The boy was, maybe 12. And the Klansmen were hooting and hollering, laughing. They had heated some coals up and they were playing a jig on a fiddle, and making the boy dance on the hot coals." George nodded his head. "I shot the fiddler first." He admitted unremorsefully. "We drove them off the usual way, squirrel and Shotguns, and Indian war cries from the tree line. We took the kid to a Traiteur on Bywater that had been helping us. But his mother was oddly quiet. They had just murdered her husband and little children … I guess, it was expected." He said thoughtfully.

"Silence is a normal reaction …" Cora offered. "When you lose a child, your baby, there's not much to say." The lounging woman had such pain hidden in the casualness of her candor with George. It was a side to her that even her girls never knew. It was conversation that only two Americans, two people who loved and trusted one another could have, to speak openly of feelings as this.

"We should've known … I should've known." There was a heavy guilt the weighed on George. His voice broke. "We shouldn't have said anything about the Reverend. We should've known she was listening to us. She was just so quiet." George fought off tears. "When we got back … The Klan had killed the Reverend. They had cut his throat, left Orange Pips all over the body." He sniffed. "I, I felt guilty. The Preacher was threatening his little girl, those people they were lynching were Lorenzo's friends. But the Klan was threatening to burn his little girl alive on a cross …" He dared not look at Cora in that moment, though she didn't know why … and she never would. "And we beat that man till he betrayed his family. It took us fifteen hours, but we broke him." George hung his head.

"They murdered the little girl?" Cora was even voiced, sliding closer to George with a mission to comfort.

"I, I went over to his house, to apologize to his girl for what we had done. But when I got to their house I found the mother from the Le Blanc share-farm. She was sitting on their front porch, rocking back and forth next to a small crate box. She was saying her children's names, her hands bloody … and there were stray dogs all over the property, their jaws covered in blood." He shook his head. "The Reverend had ordered his little girl a doll, a special doll from Paris. They lived in the Garden District. The old and rich part of town, segregated. When the girl saw a Black woman, with a package, she thought she was delivering her doll! The last gift her daddy ever got her!"

"She let her in, because, because, she thought that she was safe, because, the city was segregated!" All I kept yelling at that woman on the steps was that I saved her life. That, that I had saved her life! But all she kept saying was her children's names, like it was all she knew, all she would ever know. She just kept repeating them over and over again. Like it was a justification for what she did to that girl … ten fucking years old, and she thought it was justice!"

He was horrified and disgusted. It couldn't justify one injustice with the other, he sobbed, because, he was lost. The young man rocked back and forth covering his ears to shut out the memory of the woman continuously saying her dead children's names and the guilt of knowing that it happened, because, he had tried to be a hero again. His good will, everything he thought he was doing right, for the right cause, defending the downtrodden had been betrayed that muggy early morning. In the same vein that the mother he had saved had betrayed his mercy, George knew he had betrayed that little girl. She was an innocent, blue eyes, blonde haired, southern belle who didn't sell out her friends to the Klan, who didn't hang little children for their father's petty crime …

She simply wanted something to remember her daddy by, a daddy George's, damn fool, crusade helped murder.

Gentle, ivory arms, loving and stern, wrapped around the young man's neck. Cora had slipped out from under the covers and knelt behind her boy. She nuzzled her nose against his ear and shushed him with pained eyes that couldn't imagine how she ever allowed one of her babies to ever suffer so much alone for so long. She tightened her hold on George, pressing her chest against his back.

"Don't worry about that. It's in the past now." She whispered with a shaky breath.

"It happened, Granny … it's, it's real!" He sobbed.

His words broke her heart. The torment was in his pleading for her not to believe his own mother. For her to believe him, to not dismiss that this hadn't happened the way Mary had. He needed, desperately, for someone to believe him. He needed someone to hear him, to know that he wasn't alone anymore, carrying these things in his heart. Someone had to know that he didn't go out there every night to avoid people, to show off for potential countesses. He did it, because, a little girl who thought she was safe in her gothic southern home in the rich side of New Orleans, was butchered by a desperate mother. And, for the life of him, he couldn't bear for anyone he loved in this crumbling tomb of a dead way of life to suffer the same fate.

"It's real, Granny! She was real!"

"I believe you, Darling, I believe you." Cora whispered, kissing his temple with tears in her eyes. George turned over and buried his face against her breast, his body shaking as he held onto her for dear life. For a moment he was that brave and good child that she used to bath with every night.

"Forgive me for what happened over there, I didn't know … I didn't mean to do that to that man! I didn't know, Granny, I didn't know!"

"Don't worry about that, now. You're home, my darling."

"I saved her life! I saved her life! I saved her life!" He sobbed into her chest, damning himself in a deep guilt.

"I know you did, Darling … I know you did." She laid the side of her head against the top of his long curls.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that her door was half opened. For a moment she thought that it would be Sybbie, come to join them, as she usually did. And Cora would be grateful. The girl was always a tonic to George. Her love came so easy and so potently. But instead it was a beautiful woman with raven hair and ivory skin. Her olive branch pins glinted in the light, her goddess's gown visible in the half shadows. Mary stood hidden in the doorway, her red tinted eyes watching with a pain that went soul deep, her mouth hung open. She had come to apologize, to fight some more, to just touch base with their heated words earlier. But this wasn't what she had expected to come in and see.

Cora looked over at her daughter pleadingly. If there was ever a time to be there, to be his mother, it would be now. But the woman instead took a step backward from the door. The guilt, the self-hatred, was ingrained deeply in Mary Crawley. She had done this, done this to her child, and she was convinced that there was nothing she could say that could make up for that. She saw her mama holding him the way she wished she could. But her truth remained that George was in better hands with Mama than he'd ever be with her, a woman who couldn't take a step without making a mistake with him. Lady Grantham gave a tormented look when the door closed, mouthing her daughter's name in sorrow.

"I saved her life! I … I saved her life!"

Cora nodded, tears running down her face. There was a deep loneliness, an emptiness left in Mary's wake. Cora felt what George had felt all of his life. She had known what it was like to be ignored by a mother. But she had always had Harold, always had governesses. But, then, Robert became her family, her everything. They had built a family together out of their love. Robert had saved her from her isolation, he had whisked her away to a life that was worth living every day, knowing she was lucky for it. But their Grandson didn't have that.

There was no saving him from that isolation, that loneliness. A seven year old boy had been asked to do the impossible and when he couldn't he was exiled for it. He was sent to a land that wasn't his own for eight years of hard times, rough living, and horrors of a collapsing society that no child should see so young. And now he's returned to find, very quickly, that his country, his peers, and his family didn't want him back. They demanded that this impostor return George Crawley, Viscount of Downton Abbey, and son of the vaulted and venerable Matthew Crawley. They did not know or want this broken and angry young man in her arms, who talked funny, dressed strange, and was permanently damaged by too many heart breaks. Damaged by little girls who thought they were safe when they weren't, and how it always fell on him to do something about it when it was too late.

" _Don't worry, darling, don't … you're home now. You're safe now. Nothing bad is gonna hurt you anymore. I won't let it!"_

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

" _The Queen and the Soldier" – Kathryn Roberts & Kate Rusby_


	23. The Queen and the Soldier - Part II

**The Queen and the Soldier: Part II**

The tree's rustled and shuttered, their limbs tapping against old glass like a lover wanting a late night meeting. Shadows like the slim fingers of a Gothic maiden slipped across the floor of the room. The silver rays of the moon reflected through the open window, glaring like lights on the great theaters of the London stage. And in the moon beams, plumes of dust danced and twisted in odd shaped clouds in the soft breeze that made the hunter green shades flutter like the skirts of an old southern belle. It was a strange night, a strange dream that a young girl had woken into. She heard voices on the wind, green eyes watching the curtains. There was a sleepless specter that was over this place. In the darkest part of night, mere minutes before dawn, something old, something tormented had a second wind in its search for redemption, of absolution. The house creaked and shuttered, as if a great weight lay upon it.

There was something other worldly about Amantha Manor that young Marigold Drewe could not put her finger on.

The pre-teen's green eyes stared at the ancient toys and figurines that lined the walls of Harold Levinson's old childhood room. The shine of the moon reflected off the glassy ebony of a marionette puppet with big pink lips, dressed in overalls and a banjo in hand. There was a chamber pot with the face of Union General Benjamin "The Beast" Butler, a novelty item. The former Military Governor of occupied New Orleans was big, fat, and balding. Both Black and White citizens thought him a disgrace of a man. Lady Grantham had told her and her aunt that the man tried to court the young and very lovely Mrs. Levinson during the occupation as his young mistress. But in the end, he had run back to Virginia and the war, rather than stay to face 'the real beast of New Orleans'. Her Aunt Edith's Uncle Harold had found it and thought it would be funny to put the chamber pot in his room. But Lady Grantham whispered in Marigold's ear a warning not to touch it … she was pretty sure that Mrs. Levinson had used it time to time in effigy of the hated Yankee 'gentlemen'.

It was strange to the girl that she was sleeping in a room, in a house, that had once belonged to other people. Her room in Downton had belonged to someone before. Her other grandmother figure, her beloved Aunt Rosamund had personally gave her, her old room when she stayed at the Abbey. But that seemed different compared to Amantha. Her Aunt Edith had made Marigold a part of the family, they all, down to the servants, treated Marigold with a deep love, like she was a true Crawley. Downton was home. But here, on the other side of an ocean, in a strange land, she felt unsure about sleeping in someone else's room. To be surrounded by their things, their ancient toys, and their memories. It didn't seem right, because, this wasn't her family's home. Marigold didn't have any Levinson blood, didn't have any genetic attachment to their kin. More so tonight, than ever before, did it make Marigold feel like an interloper, like she was someone who didn't belong. The only thing that gave her a piece of mind was her Aunt's arms around her slender waist, her nose buried in the crook of her neck.

Lady Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, was snuggled up closely with her ward. Beads of sweat were on her milky skin on the muggy New Orleans morning. It wasn't that hot comparatively, but nobody else seemed to sweat as much as Lady Edith and Marigold. Both were native English women, used to cold springs, and perfectly beautiful country summers. The Louisiana Bayou was like a completely different universe from what the pair of metropolitan girls were used too. Her Aunt had packed silk pajamas. After all, they had been staying at luxury hotels, before the robbery. But, here, at Amantha, there were no cooling systems, no electricity for high end fans. If it was hot, by-god, it was gonna be hot. You learned to live with it, or you couldn't. As a ballerina, prodigal and dedicated to her art, young Marigold wasn't afraid of her sweat. But her Aunt Edith was a grand lady, the grandest in the land, and she edited, wrote, and ran a major feminine magazine. The young beauty wasn't sure if Lady Edith had ever sweated in her life, much less knew she could. By the time Marigold had woken up, silk pajamas had been shed completely. Marchioness, lady-like icon or not, Edith Pelham had abandoned modesty and was sleeping in her underwear. She could feel the sweat slicking off Edith's half nude form and soak the back of Marigold's linen nightgown. Lady Grantham hadn't been bothered by the heat before she turned in. The woman was even wearing a robe. But for Lady Edith and her ward, it was like trying to sleep in a sauna room overnight. They were completely soaked head to foot. Marigold's naked form was nearly visible through the material of her gown from their combined fluids.

Taking a towel from the nightstand, she dipped it in a bucket of water. The wakes and laps caused ice cubes to rattle against the aluminum. The girl turned over and looked down at Lady Hexham. A soft, loving, smile overcame the gorgeous young girl. A slim finger pushed away a sweaty lock of matching golden hair from her aunt's pale face. Gently, she began to caress Edith with the rag, soaked in cool water. The woman sighed contently as the girl trailed it gently down the nape of her neck. As she did, she stared at Edith.

Marigold could never fathom how anyone could say that her aunt wasn't pretty. To the girl, she wasn't the same kind of beauty as her Aunt Mary or Aunt Rose, but she was still a beauty, a real prize. And Marigold worshiped her. She didn't know her mother, she didn't know her father, or if she had brothers or sisters. All she ever had was her Aunt Edith. All she could remember was the smile on her perfect teeth whenever Marigold came into the room. It was if she could feel the warmth of the sun's rays every time she saw the girl.

There was a time in her life very recently that fear was her companion. After what happened to Uncle Bertie, the only true daddy she might have ever had in her life, she thought her world would collapse. Her Aunt Edith was sad all the time, begging, pleading, and praying that her husband would wake up from his coma. It seemed so cruel to the girl. Her Aunt Edith had lost all of her babies before they were even born, and now her husband? Her depression could've worsened when there had been so many people that tried to take Marigold away. But, instead, it broke Lady Edith out of her walking dream like state. The Marchioness of Hexham bit, clawed, scratched, and fought for Marigold. The girl, when it seemed that Edith was at the end of her rope, came to the Crawley family after their dinner and humbly offered to surrender herself to Mrs. Pelham, knowing that she was just a ward, a foster daughter that was not worth the heart ache and stress. She loved Edith too much to let her suffer so much on her account. But after what happened to her stillborn babies, what happened to her husband, Edith took Marigold by the arms and placed her in front of her. No one had ever seen Lady Edith so emotional, so passionate, and there wasn't a dry eye in the Downton drawing room when she told that sweet girl that she loved her. It wasn't something she said to appease her, something thrown about. She truly, deeply, loved her, and would never allow her to be taken away from her, no matter the cost. Marigold might not have been her daughter, but, there was never a doubt in the girl's mind, since that night, that she knew a great and unconditional love from her Aunt Edith. They were all each other had and they'd both die before ever being parted.

"You're an angel, my precious flower …" Edith whispered sleepily, absently kissing the girl's hand like she was a saint or holy being for the relief she was providing.

"I love you." Marigold whispered with glassy eyes. She was suddenly overcome by the realization that despite the sorrows, and the unknown place in the world for her, the girl knew she had been given a true happy childhood built around a deep and endless love.

"Love … no, my darling … no." Edith yawned in sleep. "The word love will never fully comprehend what you mean to me, my precious girl." She kissed the girl's stomach with closed eyes as she faded back into REM sleep. Marigold smiled and shook her head, kissing Edith's cheek. Leave it to her aunt to become so lyrical in her sleep … ever the writer.

When Marigold was tormented by bullies, even when Sybbie was there to protect her almost all of the time, she had felt so scared of the world, of the future that she wasn't sure she had no place in. Then, one day, she woke up with a book on her night stand. It was about a fictional heroine with Marigold's plight, and how she did something amazing. Her Aunt Edith had written a book, based on Marigold, for no other reason but to give her girl hope, give her comfort. She did it for no other purpose but to show the girl that anything was possible, even for someone like her. For that, Marigold would forever love Edith, and Edith would only ever think of Marigold in the most romantic sense in lyricism of a mother's love.

The breeze had died down slowly and there was a stillness that lay heavily in the air. There was just a flinch of anxiety while the young ballerina's senses scrambled to adjust to the quiet. For a long moment she looked around, feeling a strange emptiness within the house. All the spirit and atmosphere left like escaping air till the old gothic mansion was nothing but wood and stone, lifeless and soulless. Marigold laid still, eyes darting around at the eerie silence. Her wet skin prickled coldly as she slowly sat up. Quietly she got to her feet and wrung out the wet cloth into a foil pan. Her feet padded distinctively, loudly in the absence of any other noise. She dipped the cloth in the ice water and slowly lifted her gold locks up and ran it across the back of her pale neck. She closed her eyes when she felt the coolness run down her nerves, as if a waterfall of relieve was pouring over her. She sighed, feeling a pleasurable twinge in her belly and chest. But when she opened her eyes, she saw the window from a different angle. And in that angle there was a soft crimson glow reflecting on one of the shutters. With a frown on her beautiful face, the tween girl padded loudly over to the window.

She froze, the towel falling out of her hand.

On the front yard she saw dozens of shadows and silhouettes of people slowly gathering around the bowing willow tree near Lady Grantham's window. They were dark figures of every age and gender in overalls, white shirts, ragged dresses, and bare chests. They carried their babies in their arms and torches in their hands. Little children were riding the shoulders of tall, strong men, big and powerful as oxen. Streams and streams of them were coming out of the bushed forest perimeter and pathways from the cotton fields. And all of them wordlessly congregated by the willow tree, by the crude marker of a mass burial of nameless skeletons that four children dug one horrible New Year's Day. But what scared Marigold most, beyond the growing mob forming in front of the house, was the figure in the middle of the yard.

A young man, a pre-teen himself, was standing close by. He didn't say a word, didn't move, or even flinch. He had his hands on his hips as he watched the growing crowd, hanging by the front steps of the wrap around porch of the Gothic mansion. He was fully dressed in a white button down, sleeves rolled up over a dark blue long-sleeved under shirt with no collar. He wore a brand new brown outback fedora that was a little too big for his head.

"George …!" The girl gasped in fear. It had only been a few days since the battle, and though Marigold was only witness to the tail end of it, a mob forming was not a good thing in her mind.

Not bothering to wake up her aunt, she quickly darted out the door of the large bedroom. The shadowy halls of the mansion, however, stunted her instinct to go to the boy she loved. The upstairs of Amantha was a complete mess. Rails of the staircase were shattered and broken in places. Pieces of wood still lay on the ground, end tables were turned over, and there was large gashes deeply embedded in the walls. Little rays of moonlight poked through the bullet holes in the windows and pricked the debris on top of old rugs. This was a house that was severely damaged by a large and bloody fight. It never occurred to Marigold till now, seeing it at night.

They were all sleeping on the remains of a battlefield that was haunted by the presence of something truly evil.

She had heard of him all trip across the Atlantic. The first time she saw him was at Grantham House during the height of the London Season. It was a picture that Agent Cole had shown the family from a manila case folder. The 'thing' in the photo was big, tall, and had broad shoulders. She used to think that her Uncle Tom was the biggest man she ever knew, but he was a foot taller and an inch wider than the big Irishman. Her Aunt Mary thought it sounded completely ridiculous when they told her that he wore a black bull's cowl over his head … but she grew very quiet when she saw him for the first time. He didn't have a name, and no one knew what to call him.

They settled for 'The Preacher'.

He wore a red, silk, ceremonial robe and a frightening scorpion talisman made of ruby and jade. Even in pictures he was terrifying. It was made all the worst when the FBI agent informed them that George was waging a war against this … monster. The images of the bull's head, the talisman, and the robes, haunted the evening when Agent Cole had gone. No one seemed to be able to sleep that night afterward. She went to get into bed with her Aunt Edith, only to find her missing. She worked herself up in irrational fear that he had gotten her, that 'The Monster' had gotten her, till she was crying. Lord Grantham, finding Lady Grantham missing as well, found the girl crying on the stairs. She may have been a bit too old to carry, but he picked her up anyway and carried her down to the library. There she found everyone, all her aunts, Lady Grantham, Uncle Tom and Sybbie, were sitting by the fire of Grantham House with grave expressions.

They were all haunted by a single picture that contained pure evil.

But the night that the final fight went down, Marigold had been there for the end, she had seen him through the windows of Amantha. She had seen the two larger than life silhouettes dueling through upstairs, George and the monster fighting for the soul of a mansion and a family legacy. And for a moment she saw him cleanly from the second floor overlook. The Bull's fur glistening in fire light, its dead eyes reflecting the flames like a demon during a satanic sacrifice. He had jumped from the second floor, blood trailing from the stump where his hand used to be. He leapt away from Amantha and into Marigold's nightmares. When she closed her eyes all she saw was that evil 'Preacher' in his horrid cultist gear. To think that George had been here for an entire year, coming to blows with that evil 'thing' time and time again, with no one to protect him. It always nearly drove her to tears, and all she wanted to do was hold him, protect him from the worst things that happened in her imagination. Even now she paused in the halls of the mansion at night. Though the devil had absconded, she feared even his footsteps, the residue that remained where he had passed. She was afraid that his evil spirit remained and that the fiery bull's eyes were following every step that she took.

But she found her courage in the concern for George, standing alone against a growing mob. She quickly moved passed Lady Grantham's old childhood room. The raven haired woman was supposed to be curled up with George, but obviously the boy wasn't there now. Since George had gotten to Amantha a year ago, he had claimed Lady Cora's old room, and since the battle George had slept with Lady Grantham inside. But it seemed that she had no knowledge that her grandson had slipped out and into the morning.

Darting down the stairs, the tween ballerina saw that the other boys were also missing. The drawing room, the library, and the parlor room was stuffed with 'Great War' era military cots, empty lanterns, and rifle racks. The downstairs of the mansion looked like paramilitary barracks than the seat of social power in the surrounding counties. The downstairs looked worst hit. George and the Cultist Sorcerer had fought upstairs, the only damage had come between the two's duel. Downstairs was where the Runaways had made their 'Alamo', barricaded the entrances and fired out at Klansman like they were cowboys fighting off marauding Indians. By the time the FBI had gotten there, the Klansmen had overrun the barricade. Cowering behind a truck, being protected by her Aunt and Lady Grantham, the three had watched in horror at the yard littered with dead men in white sheets and a dozen wounded. Marigold would never forget the childlike sounds those hateful grown men made as they cried for help, holding their wounds as they crawled over their dead Klan brothers on the front lawn. Inside children and teenagers fought grown men in white masks in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Now, in the aftermath, all around Marigold's feet were collapsed tables, broken chairs, and an over turned Grandfather clock that got a face full of a shotgun and Klansman guts. Yet, the clock still chimed with warped softness that was barely audible. Bullet holes, saber slashes, and bayonet gashes littered the walls and halls. In day light the splashes of blood both too young and old enough was smeared dryly. It was for the first time that Marigold realized that children, kids her own age and younger, had died here.

She quietly walked barefoot over the ruins and mess. There was no fixing this, there was no going back. George wanted to burn it, Aunt Edith wanted to save it, and Lady Cora just wanted to leave it all behind. Her mother was murdered here, children had been killed in this house, and all of the people who had raised her had been tortured inside these halls. Amantha Mansion was a cursed place that could not be saved. She'd take what she wanted, send word for Harold to take the rest, and leave this place for fate and nature to claim, till the sins here, the evil that touched it, was forgotten to time. Downton was her home now.

Amantha was a graveyard.

The screen door opened with a loud rusty squeak. The hair on the back of Marigold's neck stood on end. She fought the urge to harshly shush herself in chastisement. She looked out quickly to the crowd but they didn't seem to notice. But neither did the three of the four surviving members of the Runaways.

Charlie 'Lead Belly' Steadman was shirtless, wearing only overalls, an unbuckled strap dangling to his lower thigh. The extremely large teen's dark skin seemed to shimmer in the pre-dawn hours. His caramel eyes were distracted, almost enchanted, his thick forearm wiping at his pubescent mustache. Jonah Robinson was wearing dark slacks. A white, short sleeve button down was open, revealing a young athlete's upper body cut from marble. He looked more nervous than enchanted, watching quietly with hands ringing the railing of the whitewashed front porch. The girl noticed, with a deep frown, the last of the Runaways, a young man her age named Jimmy McMurray. He was short, squat, and still had baby fat. He was dressed in a white collarless long sleeve shirt and undershorts. Puberty was still, as of yet, to touch the angel voiced cherub. He looked on in confusion and fear, just like Marigold. But what the girl couldn't understand was why 'Tornado', George's racing horse, was saddled and packed up to go. The horse's reins were in Jimmy's gentle hands as a favor to the real rider. Every person on the porch, marked by battle damaged roman columns supporting the extremely large roof over the second floor, was watching the crowd with different expectations. Marigold elegantly moved passed the boys, stepping regally down the stairs. But she felt restraining hands stop her.

"Don't …!"

"No, Marigold, stop!"

Both Lead Belly and Jonah hauled the tween dancer back, catching her. The two teenagers looked panicked and protective, like caring older brothers. They had only met Marigold once, a year ago in Memphis, they had all looked a lot different back then. But over the year, they all learned everything there was to know about Marigold Drewe from George. There was just a way that their companion used to describe the girl to his friends and comrades that made them all love her, love her before they ever really knew her. To the poor wandering farm boys and girls far from home, a ballerina from England, who lived in a castle, bastard or not, made her a fairy tale princess to the impoverished children of the South. And when the girl returned, a year older, and even more beautiful than before, she was everything the survivors of the Battle of Amantha Point imagined her to be. Though, not one of them would dare love her in any way that wasn't platonic. They'd never dream of stealing the light in their sworn bother's eye when he talked of his beloved Marigold.

"George!" the girl called out to him as she allowed herself to be carried back to the top of the steps.

"Stay there, Marigold …"

George's voice was much deeper and mature sounding than what Marigold had always remembered it being. The thirteen year old boy was changing, becoming more grown-up. Every time the girl saw him now, he seemed to be a different person than the last. These conflicts, these incidents, this wild place was slowly changing the boy she loved. Soon she wasn't sure she'd even recognize him from afar. Then, she'd have to wait till he saw her, wait till she saw that spark in him when he glanced into her green eyes. He'd change so much, maybe even completely, but George Crawley's love for Marigold would never change, only become deeper.

"I have to do this on my own." He turned back to the ballerina and his friends.

The boys all, slowly, began to nod in agreement. There was a conviction and dignity to George's voice that address everyone. He sounded like an Arthurian knight, or some noble hero from a Sir Walter Scott novel. The ballerina had never been more scared of not knowing what was happening in her life, and yet, never fell more in love with someone than in that moment. In one line, in one stalwart show of honor in his action, George Crawley showed his true mettle to those who only knew him the best in the world. Slowly they watched George unbuckle his weapon belt that had his father and Aunt Sybil's Webley revolver and an AEF bayonet knife in a sheath. He let the brown leather belt fall to the lawn floor, before he began pacing toward the gathered crowd.

There were few torches amongst them, their faces half shadowed in the fire and moonlight. Some had their African descent clear in their bone structures. Others had the look of conscious breeding by their ancestor's masters in order to create big and strong field workers. They wore rags, plaid shirts tucked into skirts made from potato sacks, the rough-spun rope holding their head scarfs in place. Their babies swaddled in weather warn flags taken from carnival poles as the show left town. Then, there were those with haunted eyes, dressed in livery coats, dapper, with blood stains on their white shirts. More were shirtless, in loose, ragged, pants. Their bodies were covered in scars from the foreman's lash. Yet, for all the grim and gaunt dark skinned faces that turned to the boy, they all stepped back to let him pass. The whole group slowly parting as George approached. Those farmers' who had hats slowly removed them. Seeing that their fathers, big and strong, were showing a moment of great respect to a boy not even old enough to shave, their small boys on their shoulders did the same. He continued forward, parting the crowd, exchanging greeted nods of respect from those he knew personally, till he reached the tree.

He stopped cold in front of the grave marker he had placed at the foot of the bowing willow. There he came upon a trio. A young man and woman flanked a wizened and slouching figure that stood in front of the grave marker. Each of the two held up the very frail figure that was waiting for George. The old man didn't have any more hair. His ashy dark skin looked like old, dry, leather. Wrinkles weighed heavily on his brow and the loose skin drooped over his eyes. It seemed his whole face was melting from his slouched head. His ancient body was bloated, covered by a tight fitting, white, long sleeve shirt and quilted denim pants. His liver spotted and shaky hands were rough and callous from years of picking cotton. On the knuckles of both his hands were tattooed two dates, his two birthdays. The day he was born, and the day that Martha Levinson came to the fields, escorted by two Union officers, and told him that he was no longer a slave and to go find feed with his new, blue coated, masters. On his hands were the reminders for the rest of his life of the day he was enslaved and the day he was truly born.

Seventy years later, the auburn haired belle's great-grandson stood before her father's former slave. The young hero and the old man did not say a word to one another. Ancient eyes who knew pain since the day they were born and young ones whose shadow was haunted by death itself, gazed upon each other. George did not flinch at the spark of hatred within the man's eye. It was an old and bitter one that followed Martha Levinson to her grave, that haunted Cora Crawley her whole life, and who now focused on the young man that carried their blood. Yet, for all the sins, George was the only person left who showed an interest in making it right. There was not enough money in the world, not enough apologies, and never enough hatred to wash away the feeling of the crack of a whip on a young boy's skin, or watch a mother be sold away from her children. There were no unseeing hundreds of black folk being murdered by their blue coated liberators so there wouldn't be so many mouths to feed. For so long, there was no belief in justice, no reparation that fit. But the hatred, as old and bitter as it was, began to fall away in old eyes.

The boy was nothing but courage and boldness standing in front of the man. George Crawley did not fight their war alongside them out of guilt. He started out in pursuit of vengeance, to redeem himself for his sins in New York. He didn't owe them, any of them, not a damn thing. He put no man in chains, nor sold a mother, or murdered families and dumped their bodies in the bayou. But he stayed in the fight, when others, even their own, had ran. He stayed, because, it was the right thing to do. He sacrificed his friends, his blood, and his innocence for them. And did all of it without guilt for other's sins. He had become comrade, ally, and friend. Amantha Mansion, once a place of darkness for them, was now the bastion of hope and freedom in the last year. Now, he stood before them, in the ruins of a place with two conflicting histories to do one last thing.

"The debt is paid …"

Everyone in the crowd watched as George Crawley slowly held out an outstretched hand. Many dark eyes of flesh, blood, specter, and future turned to the old man. The boy, too young, too honest, did not waver. He held his hand out not begging for forgiveness or friendship. He did not look on the old man as someone to be pitied, to be treated as a simpleton or helpless, because, of the color of his skin. They were not friends, they were not enemies.

They were simply men, equals, in the eyes of God.

For the first time in years, the wrinkles were lifted above the beaten brow. The large crowd watched as the old man stepped forward. His great-grandchildren moved to help, but he gently, proudly, refused them. They stepped back as the old man straightened his back, popping and crackling of aged bodily stress echoed. Shakily the old man's frail hands pushed down his suspenders. Then, he slowly began pulling the stained shirt over his head. Scars from a foreman's whip, a master's brand, and a Spaniard's bullet in Cuba, marked his old and bloated torso as he removed his shirt. With a hard, wheezed, sigh, the old man stood with a history of subjugation, suffering, and freedom written on his wrinkled skin. With as much dignity and grace as the old man found in his soul, he stepped toward the courageous boy.

There was a firm clap of palms when they braced hands.

Slowly the stern eyes of an old man who had seen too much and felt more than most in a lifetime lightened in the clasp of hands. There had been such a terrible rage in youth and such immovable hatred in old age. They were all the feelings of a man, a person, born as property, bred to be who he was for someone else's purpose and profit. From the Amantha Cotton Fields, to the battlefields of Cuba, and just to watch a picture show … he had been treated differently. All of his life the old man hadn't felt like a person. He was always at war with whom he was, the not knowing of the answer sabotaging a life. But for the first time, in front of the place he was born and bred to serve as property, he was greeted, not as friend, foe, property, or contraband. He was simply greeted as a man, as a human being. He had been hailed, of all people, by the last young man of the blood of the people who commissioned his creation into their subjection. The circle was complete, and in his soul, he felt a great burden finally lift. The last of his master's chains fell free from the oldest prison they had held him … within.

Slowly a grin, light and serene, came over the man's face. Somewhere in the moment when George and the man grasped hands in understanding, the old man, long in search of peace, finally found it in front of his prison and his descendants' salvation. He always thought he'd burn the old house to the ground, tear it to shreds. Now, when he saw the white washed mansion with the black roof, he felt only closure. For the first time in all of his life, the old man closed his eyes, and took a breath of truly free air.

Suddenly, as the first purple of coming dawn bled the open sky above the pine canopies, there was noise. A loud groan of creaking and snapping echoed in the quiet dawn. They all turned to watch as the last midnight shadow seemed to pass across the old Gothic mansion. Every white plank, black tile, and stone moaned. Like the springs of a mattress, it seemed as if a large weight that had been sitting on Amantha Manor had been lifted. And like the old man's heart, the ghosts and sins of the past seemed to leave with the darkness. The last curse on a house and the family that built it had left with the last grudge of its dark past. Now all that remained was old wood, a falling apart roof, and crumbling foundation. It was no longer a symbol of slavery, nor was it a symbol of rebellion against Socialist Traditionalism. It was simply an old house in a forgotten part of an ancient city.

The boy and old man let go of one another and shared the dawn. It was unspoken gratitude for what this place would mean someday, what it had meant to everyone that had gathered here this fine morning. Then, without saying a word, the old man gave another long, wheezed, breath of the muggy morning air, and then turned to leave. No one came to his aid and no one asked where he was going. They all watched him slowly limp away, shirtless and frail. He was no longer a slave, no longer a father, and no longer bound by hatred. All his childhood he wandered what salvation was beyond those tall soldier pines, and now, as a free man, he hobbled alone into those misty woods to find out.

Eventually, slowly, the crowd turned and began departing from the same place they arrived. The shirtless men with scars on their backs and rough spins pants, the footman and maids, and the farmers, they all slowly dispersed into the southern morning mists. Some figures slowly disappeared into obscurity for the final time in this world, finally finding peace. Those still made of flesh and blood looked to the future with cautious wonder and hope for those in their arms and riding their shoulders as they returned to their farms.

Soon all that was left was George Crawley standing under an old willow tree. His dark blue eyes gazed one last time at a crude grave marker that started all of this. He gave one last emotional breath, placing a hand on the marker of the nameless fallen, whose children and grandchildren now fell away into the obscurity of the morning. But there was no closure, no peace for the thirteen year old boy. Not at the expense of so much lost, friends, promising futures, and family relationships.

When the youth returned to the mansion stairs, his friends and Marigold were still watching the woods. One moment there was a large mob of people, the next … it was as if there had been no one there at all. For Marigold, she wasn't sure, so suddenly, if she hadn't dreamed it all. But when George trudged over the dirt path from the lawn, they all walked down to greet him. Jimmy, leading the racing steed, handed George his weapon's belt back. The youth plucked it out of the young blond boy's hand, and in brotherly gratitude, ruffled his hair till the boy swatted his hand away, their smirks never leaving their faces. They all gathered around George as the boy buckled his belt at his waist again. He looked out over his shoulder at the suddenly quiet tree line toward the swirling morning mists.

"It was right, brother … its right." Charlie tapped George's shoulder proudly with a hammy, large, fist. Jonah just nodded in agreement, shaking the boy's other shoulder in confidence. Marigold didn't know what that had been all about, but it seemed that the remaining members of the rebel band knew all about it. George was the second youngest of the group, and yet, the ballerina saw that they had all gravitated to the boy as their leader. He had put this group of friends together that had become sworn brothers through trials and tribulations that his real family could hardly imagine. When George had declared vendetta against a Hausa Shaman and his Klansmen allies, they didn't blink in following him, a twelve year old boy, to war. But now that this war was seemingly over, that same boy, a year older, and much more haunted, also took responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

That was why he was leaving.

Marigold saw the horse that was packed with his things. George had secured passage back to England for his Granny, Aunt Edith, his friends, and the girl he loved. But he had no plans of going back himself. Marigold had tears in her eyes, before she even knew she wanted to cry over that realization. It frustrated her how much she understood, automatically, when she wanted so hard not to. But she had loved George for so long now, she knew him, knew him better than anyone else. The young man saw that the girl was staring at his horse, tears in her eyes. And he lowered his head, removing his brown fedora. The rest of his friends slowly gave them space as he walked up the steps, Marigold retreating from him. She was shaking her golden head, sniffling, her young heart breaking almost audibly in the little whimper she gave.

"We're … we're going home! Please, George, we're going home today!" She pleaded with him. "I came to bring you home." She tried not to sob.

George swallowed hard. Tears were in his eyes as well. In that moment, it had never been harder on a boy so young to make such a decision. "Marigold, I … I can't do it." He shook his head. "I can't go back, not now …" He cleared his throat. "I …" He sniffed. "I don't know how." He shrugged.

His words made her whimper. "But it's your home …" She said as if it was the answer to everything. "You belong there with everyone, with your Granny, and Sybbie, and Aunt Edith, and … me." She sniffed. "You belong with me!" She cried.

"It's not that simple, Marigold!" He scoffed running his hand through his hair.

"Yes it is!" She argued. "Downton is your home, George. You belong at Downton!" She argued, never sounding or looking more like his Aunt Edith …

If he had only knew.

"People died!" George finally snapped. "People died and it's my fault!" He gestured to the willow tree with his hat, then to the house, to the debris, and to the smeared blood stains. "My friends died, people I talked into this war, and I got them killed, because, I wanted to get away from what happened in New York!" He snarled at the girl angrily. "I wanted to see myself as a hero, I wanted to redeem myself. I wanted to get past it … past everything that's happened." He shook his head. "And I was wrong, and I was arrogant, and I got them killed, Marigold! I got them killed, because, I tried to make things right, thing that can never be made right!" He looked so defeated in a moment of deep sorrow in the vocal realization that he was so completely wrong about everything in the last five years.

There was never more confidence in the world than the look on the twelve year old girl's face. "What happened to Cora was not your fault, George!" Tears ran down the girl's cheeks. "I don't care what Aunt Mary thinks, no one blames you for it …" She shook her head.

"It's my fault …" George contradicted her. "All of this, all of it, it's my fault. I've blundered from one mess to another, since New York. I, I can't … I can't go back to Downton, not like this, not after all of this. I won't hide behind Downton Abbey, hide from responsibility like mom does. My dad wouldn't have run, he didn't run." He said quietly.

"Uncle Matthew would've understood, George!" She tried desperately to reason with him. "You're a kid, we're all kids. You don't have to do this! You don't have to punish yourself every time things go bad! It's not your fault! Please, George, you're not the Earl of Grantham!" She cried.

A silence hung in the air for a loaded moment. "No …" He agreed. "I don't know who I am anymore." He said with a low and honest sincerity of a deep sorrow. "That's why I can't go home. I'll never be able to find out there." He shook his head and placed his hat back on, looking out toward the dawn. "I owe it to my friends." He nodded sadly. Then he turned to the girl.

"We were supposed to grow up together …" The girl sobbed quietly, knowing she was defeated.

To the teary confession, the boy's face fell hard. Quickly, he strode to her. She had backed away from him since their argument began, but she didn't now. The boy took her in his arms and held her tightly as she sobbed into his chest. He was giving her strength while breaking her heart in unison. There had never been a clearer contradiction that would sum up their lifelong love affair.

He laid his head on top of her golden hair. "We will …" he promised. "I'm not going anywhere, even when I'm far away, you'll always be with me, Marigold." His voice faltered. "I'll never let go, I promise, oh god, Marigold, I promise I'll never let go!" He kissed her head.

The girl sniffled hard and then looked up in his arms. Her face marked by the deepest sadness a young girl could feel. Yet, she lifted a pale hand, the orange light of dawn glistening off the perspiration. She cupped George's face and sputtered a breath.

"I know you won't. You never let go, George." She tilted her head sadly. "That's why you're not coming home." Her words stung the young boy's heart as she slowly backed away from him, away from his arms, away from his love. She hugged her chest and turned her back on him.

"Marigold …" George took a step forward reaching for an exposed pale shoulder.

"Go, Sir Lancelot ... The Holy Grail awaits." She sniffed with a snap, refusing to look at him.

Feeling a heavy heart in her rejection, the boy turned to leave. But before he did, he turned back to her. "I love you, Marigold Drewe …" It was the first time he had ever spoke the words, the first time he meant it in a way that was more than someone who was raised in the same nursery. "And I don't break my promises." He said strongly. "I promised back on that Coney Island pier that I'd marry you and be by your side forever." He nodded. "I'll come back for you, even if it takes two dozen lifetimes … I'll always come back for you." It wasn't a promise.

It was a sacred vow.

But when the girl didn't turn around, he just nodded. It didn't matter what she felt, if didn't matter if she hated him for the rest of her days. He loved her, loved her to the end of reason, to the end of madness. He wasn't sure what that all meant, being so young, but he knew deep down in his soul that he'd never love another the way he loved the beautiful ballerina.

Down the steps and back on the dirt track road, he found his remaining friends standing by his horse. He gave a soft smile and continued forward, looking more casual, carefree, as if he was just going on a food or ammunition run into town. They all knew differently, but even if this could possibly be the last time they would see each other, they'd never show it. They were too proud young men to ever show how much their friendship meant to one another.

George stopped in front of big Charlie Steadman first. His small dark eyes looked emotional, but the body language was kept casual. They were quiet for a long time. It was hard to believe, despite the teenage boy being a foot taller than the tween, but the two were brawling buddies. Never had there been two Runaways considered the most out of control sons of bitches in the rebel band than 'Lead Belly' and the 'Swashbuckler'. They gave each other grudging smirks in fake animosity to cover a deep affection.

"Man, Captain …" the large black boy sighed. "I've been protecting your scrawny ass for so long I don't even know what a vacation means anymore." He snorted in mock disdain.

"It means lying around and being useless … which is about your speed, right?" He shot back.

The boy let the insult slide off his back. "Dig ditches, fetch water, chop wood? Feh, that's slave work, boy!" He sucked his teeth. "My ancestors were African warrior kings! Big, Black, and beautiful …" He flexed his muscles.

"And fucked elephants too if you're a judge of their royal genes." George rolled his eyes.

Charlie gave the younger boy a condescending look. "Pure necessity, son, I mean, you've seen my dick … you think there's a girl alive that I wouldn't damn near kill in bed with this mushroom tip?" He bragged loudly.

George didn't answer. He just patted the big kid on the arm. "They're gonna love you in England …" He chortled with a shake of his head. "Take care of yourself, Charlie." He began to walk away. But suddenly, he felt a big powerful arm wrap around his chest and pull him off his feet and into a big bear embrace from behind. The smaller boy got a big smirk when he looked up at the teenager who had a tear in his eye.

"Look out, out there, Cap'." He gave him a good shake.

"Alright, alright …" He patted the gigantic forearm endearingly with a chuckle. When they broke apart, the younger braced his elder by his upper arms, not tall enough to clasp his shoulders. They gave one another a nod and then George moved on.

Jimmy McMurray wasn't holding 'Tornado's' reigns anymore. The small kid still looked younger than he really was. It gave George a piece of mind that at least someone in their group didn't seem touched by the war. He wasn't the youngest Runaway, but he was now. Jimmy wasn't much for fighting, and had spent much of their adventures and skirmishes guarding Amantha. But there was never a kid alive who had a nose for finding a good time … or making his own. The gifted musician had a destiny in something other than violence, and George was happy that he'd have a chance to find it in the safety of England and away from the Desperation of the poverty crippled American South, filled with strife and racial violence.

George pinched the fat kid's cheek. "It gets cold in Jolly Ole' … save some for the winter." He shook the boy's head with his fingers.

"Meh, knock it off!" The boy, raised in a very affluent and intellectual home in Mississippi, had an educated and smooth southern style to his voice. He gave George a push. The fat kid was used to the older boy's teasing, being the only one in their group of friends that the twelve and now thirteen year old could actually tease and get away with physically.

"Hey, George …" He said with a sudden seriousness.

He was looking down at his bare feet when George stared at him inquisitively. "Yeah, Jimmy …?" He asked.

"You'll get him, right?" He looked up with sad and hate filled eyes. "If you see him in your travels … promise me you'll get him." He asked.

Weeks later, George, was looking at the small boy that was haunted by the sight of their dead friends strewn on the yards and in the mansion. He smiled, he laughed, and he joked with them. But all the bruising, all the rot, was deep within. He didn't mean what he smiled about. Inside, he'd never be the same, they all wouldn't. But right now, he had never meant more the words he spoke. He wanted George to get justice, because, it was always George who got justice for people when they couldn't do it for themselves.

"I'll find him …" George looked the boy in the eye. "If I have to chase him through every circle of hell, Jimmy, trust me …"He placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "The ones that murdered our friends, they may have escaped the law, but they won't escape justice. I'll hunt down every last one of them." He promised with a vengeful darkness in his eyes.

The final one of his friends he moved too was the one that was hardest to part with. Jonah was holding Tornado's reigns, petting the midnight black steed's soft mane. He didn't look at George when the young man approached. He just fed the rest of the carrot to the animal, stroking his ear. If nothing it was the last display of a good old country boy, before he shipped off to the metropolitan world of London Publishing. George halted near his best friend.

"You don't need to chase him …" The teen said quietly.

"The Preacher …?"

"You don't need to chase him, he'll come to you soon enough." He was gravely serious as he scratched the horse behind the ear.

"And I'll be waiting." There was darkness in George's voice.

The older teen looked back with narrowed eyes. For a moment he looked as if he might say something mocking, jovial, or doubtful in the theatrical way George spoke. But he didn't. They had all been through a battle, and they had all killed men. Jonah had known George for a good while now, and he knew what the boy was capable of. You don't cut a mammoth of a monster's hand off with a Great-Great-Grandfather's Confederate saber and not mean what you say in matters of combat. He just nodded with a jaw wired strongly as he gave the horse a pat on the flank of his neck.

It was time.

In three years, the two best friends had been close since the day that Jonah had pulled a freezing and beaten ten year old boy from under a snow drift. The two had seen one another at least once a day since. Now it seemed that after all the days of high adventure, tragedy, fun, and exploration, they had come to the end of the road. Their paths had always been going the same way for so long, it was hard to fathom that this was where the road split. A part of Jonah resented that it was here, when it didn't have to be. He agreed with Marigold, the young man could be meeting up with them in Liverpool. That he could be there for his friends after they land on an alien shore, to help them out. But he knew George better than that.

There was a reason that they had all followed a twelve year old brandishing his daddy and aunt's gun. And it wasn't that they were all crazy, or at least, it wasn't only that they were all crazy. In a world in which it was every man for himself, or starve … George Crawley never left a man behind, even if you weren't part of the crew. He had a charm bred into him, but it was his actions. He was a natural heroic (Self-proclaimed) son of a bitch, and people followed him, because, he had that certain 'something' that so few people had. And when they lost friends, he took responsibility for it. But when they lost most all of their friends, he acted as if he had been the one who pulled the trigger. When bad things happen, George Crawley saw it as his fault. He got all of them into this, and now he had to pay for it. It didn't make any sense, but then, men of action seldom do.

Even now, the young man saw himself as the world's worst person. Yet, he had just won thousands, upon thousands, of dollars and screwed every gambler in New Orleans out of their money. And not a cent of it was for personal gain. Every bounty hunter, out of pocket gambler, and paid thug in 'The Big Easy' was looking for George Crawley, because, the boy wanted to get his Grandmother, Aunt, and girl he loved home. He wanted to buy his remaining friends a new start in a safe place. That was the George Crawley Jonah knew, someone who did something like that, for people he loved, and yet couldn't let go of the ghosts he forced to haunt him. He wished he could be mad at him. But truthfully, he couldn't be that selfish. He could tell George when he jumped his train to Texas, to get on the first ship out of Indianola for England. But he couldn't rob someone else of the help that the stubborn jackass would give his life to give.

"Gonna be quiet without all the stupid in my life." He snorted.

George glared lightly. "And I just might get rich, now that all the ignorant is out of mine." He shot back.

"You're already rich …"

"Well, now I might make a list somewhere."

"Only if you don't end up dead …"

George smirked. "And give my mother another reason to gloat? I'd die first!" He chuckled.

There was a rue grin on the older boy's face as the younger extended his hand for his horse's reigns. There was a long pause, the teen's face falling slightly. He looked as if he might say something, might make one last plea for reason, for a plan that involved George showing up a week behind them. But he just sighed and shook his head, giving the reigns over. He watched the boy lead the horse away. He followed him a few steps and watched him get ready to mount.

"What should I tell your Mammie and Aunt when they get up in an hour?" He asked. George grunted as he swept up into the saddle smoothly, as if he was born on top of a horse. Jonah would ask where he learned to ride like that. But the answer was obvious and not a welcome one.

"Tell'em …" He paused, patting his horse on the neck. He looked up at the bedroom windows of the two women he loved most in the entire world. The spark of regret was reflected in the orange light of dawn. He cleared his throat with a shake of his head. "Tell'em I'm sorry." He bowed his head, giving a nod in emotional agreement with the heartfelt sentiment.

Jonah took a hold of the horse's bridle. "Might sound better comin' from you, than from me." He said with a low comfort in his smooth voice. George nodded quietly as he turned the reigns.

"Yeah, maybe …" He snorted sadly. "But they'd believe you more than me." He replied moving the horse.

They walked together for a few paces. Neither one of them really knew how to do this. They didn't know how to say goodbye. It might be a very long time till they saw each other, and there was a possibility they might never again. After everything they had been through, both of the boys weren't sure what to say or how to go about saying it. They had run whiskey from Highland's New Jersey to Hell's Kitchen, jumped a moving train while being shot at by Pinkertons, and imprisoned on a Tennessee chain gang. Together, side by side, they had traversed the wintery abode of the Smoky Mountains and fought a war against the embodiment of evil. All of that, all those adventures and dangers seemed easier than this moment.

"I'm thinking of taking up fishing … I ain't never ate a British fish."

"Yeah? Well I'd stay away from the ones at Gosford Park, the McCordle fish pies."

"Why's that?"

"They're all full of shit."

They laughed together, the two of them being the only ones who knew what the other was _actually_ talking about. When the laugh was over, they both looked slightly emotional as that gazed at one another. Slowly it was George who held his hand out.

"Till we meet again, Old friend." He said stoically.

Jonah took his hand, placing his other on top of the clasped ones. "Till we meet again, my good friend." He nodded emotionally, his voice cracking. They held onto one another just a moment longer, till they finally let go. George gave one last curt nod and began to trot away.

But he halted before he reached the edge of the perimeter when he found Marigold standing at the railing next to the trellis covered in wild roses. The light of dawn was caught in her hair like a halo. The gulf breeze cut the heavy air, carrying her long tresses of gold with a glistening shimmer. The sadness in her deep green eyes seemed to only enhance her beauty in a strange way. There was something tragic about the girl that was born from sadness into sadness, and there in her sorrow was where she was meant to be. The architecture of the house, the look of the haunted beauty upon its front porch, made it seem as if Marigold was tailor made to wander it's halls and rooms as wilted rose peddles caught her golden hair in a shower.

The raised porch of the Gothic mansion brought the girl to a mounted George's shoulders. They didn't say anything. She could no sooner convince him to come home with her, as he could convince her of why he couldn't. But in their shared gaze as the sun rose over the tree tops, neither could deny how much they loved one another. For the first time, young children began to feel what that could possibly mean. Any grown-up, if they had revealed these things to them, would shrug it off. They would tell them that they were bound to feel it again many times more in their life. But they'd be wrong. George and Marigold would know that. There was something here, something that was one of a kind, something that most people would chase all of their lives. They couldn't deny that, yet, they couldn't tell anyone. But they didn't need them to tell them what it was that they felt when they looked into each other's eyes.

Slowly George leaned low in the saddle to meet Marigold who stood against the railing. He didn't know what he was doing, but he knew he had to do this. He knew from the moment that he saw her standing there in a shower of rose peddles that there was only one thing to do. It wasn't cockiness, it wasn't confidence … it was instinct that brought him to her lips. And the girl led him there with slender and gentle hands. It was awkward and strange as any first kiss would be between two children that had never kissed anyone before. But when they touched lips, there was a part of them that knew that it could never happen again. It was too perfect, too consuming, and if they were to kiss again they'd know they'd never be able to part from one another. In one lip lock as rose peddles showered them …

They knew they were made for one another.

When they broke apart, George opened his eyes to find that Marigold still had hers closed. He waited, but the girl didn't open them. She wouldn't dare look upon him, to ruin this, the perfection of her first and far few moments of true happiness, by watching him ride away from her. George gazed a moment longer, burning, searing, the sight of the most beautiful girl in the world amongst a shower of roses, captured in a moment of true happiness.

Tears were in his eyes as he gave his mount a sharp kick. The horse gave a cry of excitement and charged across the lawn and onto the dirt track. The three boys rushed forward, giving chase, emotion in their chests. They watched the black stallion gallop into the shadowy corridor of a lonely stretch of dirt road lined with bowing trees whose twisted limbs made a tunnel. The group of young men stopped at the edge of the tree line and watched the figure's dirt trail.

But in a well of parting emotions, the young man wheeled his wild steed. There was something fitting, something right, when he drew his revolver. George reared his horse onto its hind-legs and fired a shot into the air. An overwhelming passion of emotions overcame the last surviving members of the Runaways at such a powerful and defiant sight. With tears in their eyes they all answered with a loud and passionate rebel yell, fists in the air, and love in their hearts. The young man then charged into the dawn and eventually out of sight, watched on by his sworn brothers who stood arm in arm at the beginning of a new day.

It would be two years before anyone heard anything from George Crawley. Many had given the boy up for dead, and some prayed with all their hearts it would be the case. He had disappeared from all knowledge. His family, eventually, gave up on him. The talks were only starting to begin of naming Sybbie heiress of all. But Marigold was the only one who knew he was still out there. When she closed her eyes she could feel herself at his side, feel his arms around her. While everyone else wanted to continue with the hard business of moving on with the estate, Marigold knew better.

George Crawley would always come back.

 _Blue eyes blinked open, and a deep numbed ache ripped through his shoulder. The Pilot groaned in protest. He tried to sit up for a moment, but suddenly felt as if a large weight had been attached to his arm. With a grunt he heard the sound of hard scrubbing nearby. Dazedly he turned and saw that Thomas Barrow, the butler, had been sitting in a chair by the sink next to him._

 _The dapper man looked to be frazzled and spent. His damaged hand shook in flayed nerves and bottled up emotion. A bucket was at his feet and a scrubbing brush in hand. In his lap was George's Leather Jacket. The Butler had been sniffling emotionally, scrubbing the blood out of the coat furiously so that it wouldn't stain. He knew how disposable, how unsentimental, George could be with outerwear. But there was something symbolic, recognizable, about George Crawley and that old beaten leather jacket. Everyone associated George with it, that leathery must, the dash to the popped up collar. He might not be able to repair the owner, but he knew how to repair leather, even if he had to drive to Gloucester to do it._

" _You look horrible …"_

 _The Butler looked up when he heard the drowsy comment. He saw George leaning on his elbow, supported by his unwounded shoulder. Thomas cleared his throat, and tried not to smile. But the harder he fought, the more a sobbed sputter of a laugh escaped his lips. George wasn't sure if he was laughing, crying, or both. But the older man seemed happy to hear him._

 _The pilot shook his head. "Sewing my clothes and crying by my … table side?" George snickered painfully. "You sure you're not my mother, Thomas?" The Captain grunted._

" _Lucky thing I'm not, Master George … twelve hours of labor just to bring eight pounds of brainless stupidity into the world? I'd hold it against you all my live long days, sir." Thomas put the jacket aside and began to move the bucket inside the sink. With a grunt, George scoffed. He looked dazed, half-sober, but drifting. He saw that his hospital bed was in fact the island of the Downton Kitchen._

" _Well …" He grunted in discomfort. "Congratulations, Thomas, I think you just cracked the mystery of Lady 'Bloody' Mary." He allotted sarcastically. "My life makes sense now." He shook his head as he looked around. "Is everyone okay?" He asked. "Did I save them?" There was a strange, muddled logic that brought fear in his voice. "She told me … told me to save the train." He sounded uncharacteristically panicked. "I thought I saved the train." He looked wildly around at the empty kitchen. George was so deathly afraid that he had done what he had always done._

 _Come up short when his family needed him most._

 _Thomas turned quickly. "You did … Master George, you saved everyone." He assured him gently. "They were down here earlier. They've gone up to discuss what to do. Mr. Branson has gone to get Lady Sybil and Ms. Marigold. And her Ladyship and everyone else are trying to maintain order with the guests, you made quite the entrance …" He chuckled lightly at the understatement of the century. But when he turned George didn't seem to hear him._

" _I miss her, Thomas … she was the only one who cared. In all those years, she was the only one who was there. When I was in that North African dungeon, she sang to me to sleep every night. I … I don't know why I can't … can't remember her. But I miss her." A single tear fell down his cheek._

" _Who, sir?" Mr. Barrow had a strangely emotional reaction to the pilot's muddled, nonsensical nostalgic sadness._

 _George just shook his head. "I don't know …" he bowed his head. "I just know that I love her." There was something innocent in his voice that made the butler's eyes glass over. "I made her a promise, Thomas, I promised that I'd save the train …" He said._

" _Well, you did, sir. There's no doubt about that. You did it right." His voice cracked._

 _George nodded. "First time for everything." He sniffed. "I guess there's only one thing left to do …" He said dazedly._

" _What's that sir?" Thomas wiped his eyes and turned back to the sink. Slowly, George slipped his legs over the edge._

" _Go just lie back and look at the stars …"_

" _No, Master George!"_

 _His boots had hit the floor, but there was no strength in his legs to hold him up. He snarled at the shooting and crippling pain in his leg when he hit the ground hard. He growled in agony, rolling onto his back and lifted his damaged limb off the ground and cradled it to his chest. The pain was intense as the blood was starting to rapidly soak the fresh bandage around his leg. He felt his arm start to go numb when the ache in his shoulder started to pound like a drum. There was a sobriety that overcame him in the excruciation._

 _Immediately Thomas rushed to George with a face in a mask of panic, fear, and frustration. He squatted quickly, swooping down on the young master of the house determinedly. "Come on, Master George!" He grunted, while the youth growled in his ear. He placed a hand under George's thigh and loped his uninjured arm around his shoulder. With a heave of effort, he lifted the Pilot off the floor and onto his healthy leg. Then, with a strained grunt, he helped George back up on the kitchen island. In a rushed memory, he remembered a small lad who used to request piggy back rides from the kitchen, all the way down to the guest quarters. How effortless, how easy, the small boy was to pick up. The happy revelry only made him scared, made him worriedly angry._

 _George was starting to feel weak. His head got lighter as his bandages got wetter and wetter. He didn't need Thomas to know that it wasn't a good sign. He gritted his teeth in pain when the butler pushed aside the pant leg material of his trousers to look at the bandage around his thigh._

 _He knew he was bleeding out._

" _You reopened the wound on your leg …" He said putting both his palms down hard on the wound. In response George let out a strangled growl of a roar, pounding on the table loudly. The butler was breathing heavily as he whipped around at the young man who had squinted his eyes from the excruciation. "You're a brainless jackass, you know that?!" Thomas snapped at the ace pilot with frustration._

 _George chuckled soberly between grunting pain. "Now you sound like my actual mother." He breathed heavily thumping his head on the wooden table covered in bakery flour and his blood. His pectoral muscles tightened when the butler applied more pressure, but blood was still seeping through his fingers._

" _It's no use …!" The man said in a panic. He went to the sink and soaked his hands in the wash bucket. He was moving across when George stopped him._

" _Where are you going?" He asked faintly._

" _To …" He breathed harshly, fear in his eyes when he paused. The Butler wiped his brow with a wrist. "I got to go back up and get some help!" He shouted with a senseless panic._

" _Screw that …" George panted. "I'll be dead by the time you do." He pushed Thomas toward the stove. "Get the cover off that burner and set it to high!" He pointed, sucking in the pain. The butler gawked in confusion. "Do what I said, goddamn it!" George pointed with a commanding snap._

 _Thomas turned and began to do as instructed. Prying the metal swirl off the main burner of the oven, the older man turned the nob on high. He watched the blue tipped flame flicker up, dancing and swaying seductively. Suddenly, the butler heard something sharp and metallic unsheathe with a scrape that send shivers down his spine._

 _THUNK!_

 _He whipped around to see that George had drawn a blood stained curved knife with Persian runes carved into Damascus steel. A ruby was on the end of a golden pummel wrapped in black leather. The ceremonial weapon, meant for status, had seen more combat in two years than it had in hundreds. With an expert slit, the young man cut the bandage off his leg. Then, with a twirl between his fingers, he jammed it into the island surface, near his undamaged thigh with a hard slam._

" _Heat it up and close it!" He panted._

 _The man's eyes were wide as he contemplated what the young master was asking him to do. He had been in the trenches, worked at the Grantham Memorial Hospital, and ran Downton as acting sergeant during the war. But this was the first time that anyone, much less the Lord of the manor, had asked him to burn a man, to cauterize flesh._

" _Did you hear me, Thomas?! Close the damn wound!" George barked._

 _The butler flinched. "Master George …" He shook his head in momentary protest._

" _I'm gonna bleed out, because, it isn't proper?! If I say burn me, I don't mean when I'm dead, man!" George roared intemperately at his Butler._

 _There was indecision for a moment, despite the harsh words. But when he realized that there was no other way, he resigned himself to the hard task. He rushed over and pulled the Persian knife from the counter. He quickly move to the stove and began holding the knife to the fire. He looked back to see that George was staring at the ceiling, his hand grasping his leg tightly, holding the wound down. It would give him an extra few minutes. His eyes lightened in sadness as he turned back to the knife that was starting to glow an orange crimson. When he thought of a young lad he'd known and loved his whole life, it broke his heart to think that his world had been so harsh growing up, that not only did he know how to cauterize a wound, but that he needed it done to himself._

" _Come on, it's hot enough. I'm starting to blank out here." George rasped, his voice growing faint._

 _There was a strange music that set Thomas's hair on the back of his neck on end when the super heated blade cut through the cool kitchen air. A sauntering trail of smoke fizzled above the sharp point of the knife. He paced quickly back, holding the ceremonial weapon aloft. He halted just in front of George. The young man, lying flatter on his back, presented his wounded leg._

" _When I remove my hand, you hold it on the wound for eight seconds." He grunted. "No matter what happens, or what I say, you hold it there for eight seconds." He commanded._

 _Sweat was pouring down Thomas Barrow's face, not only, because, of the searing hot blade close to him. There was a hesitation in his movements. He had never burnt a man, never seared a man's skin, or inflicted this much physical pain on someone, much less someone he loved like his own child._

" _Master George …" He fell off as he couldn't think of what to say. "This is going to hurt." He finally pointed out with a shaky breath._

 _The weight of his words failed to produce the entire globe of paternal love that was on the man's back. He didn't say it as a warning; he said it as if he was to be excommunicated from a sacred religion. Thomas Barrow would never have children. He would only have this family, this young man. He knew and accepted that long ago. Looking back on his own childhood, the dapper man swore that he'd never hurt the children, Lady Sybbie, Miss Marigold, and most of all Master George. He'd never hurt them the way he had been hurt when he was a child. And if he was to do this thing, he'd break all the vows he swore for so long._

 _George reached blindly next to him. "You ever loved someone, Thomas …" He asked. The Butler watched the youth grope around till his hand found Mrs. Patmore's rolling pin. "You ever love someone till they're apart of you, till you know, for sure, that their name is carved onto your heart, before they were ever born?" He asked rhetorically. "Then, one cold, snowy night, when you plan to ask her to marry you. She tells you that you're cousins …" George hammered the rolling pin till one of the handles fell off. "And not the marrying kind …" Thomas watched wordlessly as George threw the rest of the pin away and grabbed the broken handle. George panted, his eyes becoming hazier by the second. Then, he looked to his old friend._

" _Pain …?" he laughed mirthlessly. "I've had worse." He replied, placing the handle between his teeth._

 _It was expected of him to do his duty, but the butler only stared into his Lordship's eyes. He had always seen George, his Master George, as the kindest and bravest little soul he had ever known. A boy, despite what he had heard from others of the vile and evil Mr. Barrow, still brought an orange when he heard he had been hurt. There were few people that had been kind to him in his life, but George Crawley wasn't kind to him, he was a true friend, since the first time he could say his name. How was he supposed to do this to him? How could he be expected to do this thing?_

" _It's all right …" George suddenly nodded, teeth bitten down on the wood. "It's alright, Thomas." He said understandingly. It would seem that Master George had let his old friend off the hook on this._

 _Tears were streaming down Barrow's eyes. "Thank You, Master George … I'm so sorry." He began to apologize._

 _Suddenly, George removed his hand from his leg, while his other hand shot for Thomas's like a striking snake. Without warning, without even the time to protest, Mr. Barrow watched George force his hand and the knife downward onto the wound. His eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets when he saw the blood sizzle off the superheated metal touching the bleeding wound. For a moment he smelt cooking meat._

" _ **AGGGHHHHH!"**_

A thin layer of dust obscured the pale moonlight, moving on the frigid wind like an invisible sheet through the desolate, rocky, landscape. In the ancient land with a thousand names, each one holy, there was endless struggle to claim it. Within the lands designated as promised by the great divine figure of worship, his hand, his purpose, brought out violence in the hearts of men. It was a tale as old as time, the brutality and violence that was born in the name of a deity. And nowhere on earth was there more evidence of this than here, in the British Colony of Palestine, once the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Christian Rule, once a Roman province when it was taken from the Kingdom of Judea, a half of a once united Israel. Each religion who claimed it as their Holy place fought one another for ownership.

It was a Christian Colony owned mostly by Jewish landowners whose outliers were Muslim. It was all a walking contradiction that came to ahead in these last few years. German expeditions, anti-Semitic sentiments, and British Colonel presence had ramped up these tensions of each tribes Nationalism. Each side had their own methods of achieving their goals. Jewish representatives filed paperwork, recruited lawyers, and petitioned the League of Nations for a Jewish State of their own within their promised land. Meanwhile Arab fanatics, armed with Nazi weapons, chose to rebel against British and Jew alike. Gathering together in 'Liberation' militias to attack Jewish settlements, farms, and harass British Army outposts. The years of violence had been terrible and the tensions only grew as more and more Jews fled Europe to take refuge in the Holy Land. Meanwhile Nazi popularity and propaganda emboldened Arab war parties to commit atrocities and invite terrible retribution from British Commonwealth soldiers in their towns. But on a night like tonight there was something almost biblical about the setting.

Fore on the scene was showcased a deep and bloody example of the state of the world's most sacred land.

Small campfires spread out like flickering fireflies in the darkness, their hazy smoke collected in the distance whiffing on a strange incense of herbed brush and olive branches that was carried by the wind. There, Arab Militia Fighters sat to warm themselves in the shadow of a crumbling stone fortress, built centuries ago. It was once an imposing sight to pilgrims from Europe and bandits who attempted to rob them. But the days of the Templar Knights were long over, as showcased in the long winding stone tower and fortified walls that were make-shiftly reinforced by British Engineers during the Campaign against the Ottomans in 1917. The old stone wall was more Earth Works and Palisade now. But the Arabs kept out of range of it, because, tonight the old Crusader fortress was not empty.

The Nazi Expeditionary Force needed the road through the Jewish town in order to reach an ancient temple with a secret that only their best scientists could hope to understand. Through back channels into the British Foreign Office, the English Lords and Ladies, attracted to the Nazi ideology, had assured them that the passage through Empire territory would be amicable. Neville Chamberlain was willing to give Hitler whatever he wanted and the Fuhrer was still publicly opposed to war with England, enjoying the company of his friends within the British Aristocracy in the form of the Mitford Sisters and Sir Oswald. His Expedition leader, a brutal commander of the Waffen SS, was assured that they would meet no resistance from a Chamberlain Government. But they made no mention of the local population or rogue elements in Commonwealth units within the British Army. The Germans marched forward with their Arab allies, assuming that any local resistance would be dealt with handedly. The SS Colonel had spent years in paramilitary campaigns against Republicans in Spain.

But all morning and into the afternoon, a mixture of Stormtroopers and Arabs had tried to take the castle. Each time they had been repelled quite handedly, and with greater and greater loss. Now in the night the fighting had been over for hours. The starlight above the shade of skinny olive trees showed no sign of who was in the fortress or who was opposing them. The German officers were furious at their men, their Arab allies, and at the Nazi High Command. They had been led to believe by the British Peers that they'd be given free reign, and instead they had been led into a trap. Worst of all was they had no Armor, no Artillery, and no Air Support. They had been beguiled into battle with an unseen enemy in a heavily defended position that they couldn't be moved from. It was also an engagement that had to be ended quickly. The British Army wouldn't allow a fight to last on their soil between their citizens and German soldiers.

The defenders had to be drawn out.

A scouting party, looking for a way through an ancient aqueduct, had found a young town's girl washing her clothing and her toddler child. The Stormtroopers had taken her back to their makeshift headquarters in a shepherd's cottage. Years fighting in Spain had taught the Colonel many horrible truths about the human condition. There was not a fire, there was not a sound, that came from the old Templar fortress as the sun began to sink. But the SS Colonel knew they were watching when he set loose the Arab leader of the Militia.

The defenders of the Crusader Castle watched while the young Jewish woman and her child were stripped naked and paraded through the camp. The Nazi's were cursing and snarling, while, the Arabs were spitting and striking her and her child with their shoes. To the two groups of men the young mother, the Jew, had less worth and was less clean than the goats she tended. They had brought them just out of range, just behind the Arab sentry posts. They expected a response from the battlements, but they received none. They, once again, expected something when they forced the girl to her knees. But the unseen enemy remained uninterested. When the Arab unsheathed his sword, there was nothing. And when the Scimitar hacked and hacked till the woman's head rolled one way, and the toddler she was holding rolled another … there was no reaction. The Nazi Colonel had become furious. He strode just out of range and kicked the young woman's decapitated head toward the Crusader Castle. He named them swine, named them cowards in harsh German.

But there was no reply.

For hours and hours the baby had cried, screaming for her mother. But every time she had tried to crawl toward the warmth of a campfire, an Arab freedom fighter kicked dirt in her face and swatted at her with a shoe. So the girl sat in the cold, crying and crying, till she had stopped, and simply burrowed under the cold corpse of her mother.

"Call it, Sarge …"

"Dakshinee hava hamen dene vaala hai ... chaalees yaard atirikt ret unakee aankhon mein hogee, jab tak aap santaree aag mein nahin hote tab tak aapako paryaapt kavar dena chaahie."

"What do you think?"

"Agar yah kaam karata hai to is duniya mein ek aurat nahin hogee jo is ke baad aapaka bachcha nahin chaahenge."

"Yeah, if it works …"

"My father was a great fortune teller in Bombay, Commander. People came from all over India to gain his blessings and take his advice. He taught me how to see into the future when I was very young. Do you think I've would've followed you into so many adventures if I didn't know they'd work out?"

"One less thing to worry about, I guess. So how's the rest of my future looking?"

"There's a great chance …"

"Yeah?"

"That you'll fuck your mother."

"…"

"…"

"I guess I'll look out for that. Thanks Sarge …"

"I only relay what Shiva tells me, sir."

George Crawley pounded lightly on the Indian Riflemen's shoulder. He got up from his sitting position behind the retaining wall next to the turban clad man who wore a brown poncho cape over his tan uniform. Instead of a bayonet on his belt there was an ancient Indian Kukri blade. He stood crouched amongst several, similarly dressed, sharpshooters from a detachment of the 10th Poona Rifles. Their non-regulation gear and ornaments spoke to the devil-may-care culture of the Palestine posting after three years of open Arab rebellion. They stood quietly from their hawk's perch on top of the crumbling tower, their dark eyes shined like a predatory bird. They didn't miss what they could see, and they saw much. They were jungle fighters, expert marksmen in a dense setting. Putting them on top of battlements, overlooking an open field, was simply unfair to their enemies. The field of dead Nazi and Arabs could attest to that. They quietly cleaned their artist's tools and reloaded. As George left they gave him a determined nod that assured him that they'd back him up.

Standing further down the tower was two of the most impractical people that George had ever seen for a battle. Leftenant O'Rourke was a short, bristling, man with bright red hair and long sideburns. His pointed nose and general hostile disposition to the known world made him look like the mascot for the University of Notre Dame … and yet he was Scottish. It was an amusing contradiction to the young Ranger Commander that endured himself to the Engineer who's only passion in the world was to make "Shite blow-up". And the Leftenant with the 5th Glasgow Artillery was sore at the world at the moment. His temper was only dampened by the bonnie sight he couldn't take his eyes off of.

Several officers, a mishmash of 'unofficial' military advisers, were extremely wrapped up in the appearance of a young woman. She wore a blue silk brassier that was clipped together by gilded metal straps. The same thin metal straps sat on her exposed hips that connected a silk skirt that draped her front and back, but was slit all the way up her creamy hips. The gorgeous belly dancer's smooth skin was completely exposed but for her coverings. Her long raven hair was brought down to her bare back and a gilded tiara was upon her brow. Sybbie Branson looked like a Princess from "John Carter of Mars". She knew it, she hated it, and she flaunted it factiously while she looked out at the situation with George's binoculars.

It was just his luck that he was planning to do the second stupidest thing he had ever done in his life and he had to rely on two intemperate Celts.

"This is completely unacceptable, you know that don't ya?"

The Scotsman started on the Colonial Ranger the minute he appeared. He tore off his dark blue beret with a white ribbon and nearly threw it to the ground, before he realized what he was about to do. He made an irritable sigh and plopped it back on his balding head.

"I stole …"

"Eh! Acquired, Leftenant, acquired."

"Fine, I 'acquired' all of these bloody guns, two mortars, a 6 pounder, and even a damn Howitzer! And we didn't even get to use any of it!" he raged.

"Shhh …" George hissed.

The smaller man gritted his teeth mid-rant, grasping the air in front of him in vice. "What was the point …!" He hissed quietly under his breath, his freckled face turning beet red.

George glared. "I already told you, we wait till they commit the rest of the force, then we'll open up on them. We've got fire power, they don't. But we use it wisely." He shot back as he strode toward a quiet Sybbie. He shrugged off his double breasted leather coat.

"Yea promised me action, Crawley!" The small man warned.

George wheeled around. "And you'll get it …" He pointed a finger at the small man. "But not till we make that goose stepping son of a bitch commit." He gave the Scotsman a push. It was clear in his tone that there was deep history and even deeper hatred for the enemy commander below. "Now get the Mortars ready." He said with authority.

"You just said …"

"Get the mortars ready … I promised you dead Nazi's, here's your chance."

The teenager paused till the small officer grumbled and moved over to the other side of the battlements. The Palisade was manned by a mismatched group of young, middle aged, and old men with Enfield rifles from the war. They were tanners, farmers, shepherds, toy makers, and inn keepers from three Jewish counties. Many of them had fought for the British Commonwealth during the war, and the younger had fought off Arab death squads attacking their farms. The British Government had given a Nazi regiment, special men who rounded up and guarded the Jewish death camps, free access to the local Jew's most sacred religious site. They had come from all over to fill the levies in order to stop them.

The red haired, blued eyed, arsonist waved over at a sandbagged entrenchment behind the main defense line. There an old man with whiskers and beret was leaning against the sand bag wall, smoking a pipe. While a tall and fat lad, with a soul patch and no other facial hair drew in the sand with a stick. The two Scotsmen, however, looked up at their countryman when they saw him waving from above.

"Mcinish, ya bastaird sloppy, a fháil go fheadáin borradh réidh le haghaidh roinnt spraoi, yeah?!"

While the Scottish Leftenant cursed in Gaelic at the mortar crew, George walked up to Sybbie. Her breath was visible and her smooth skin was like ice when he came up to her. She didn't seem to acknowledge him, till he folded his coat over her. She turned to look at him, and he felt horrible.

She looked stricken and emotionally vulnerable. When she came over from Downton, this was not what she signed up for. They were racing airplanes just a week ago, having a great time, the best times. Now, she was standing in a crumbling castle, scantily clad, and watched a girl their age be beheaded right in front of her. And when she tried to do something, George tackled her to the ground. She hit, she cried, and she tried to scream. But the young pilot held her down, covered her mouth, as she sobbed. She cried and fought till she couldn't hear the mother scream anymore. Now, for hours, all she could hear was that poor baby crying for her mother, for someone to help her. Sybbie had shed her desert robe, her head scarfed cowl that George gave her for cover when she first arrived. She wasn't sure why she stood mostly naked in the freezing night, but she felt it was a strange sort of penance for not being able to help that poor girl.

The teenage kid expected to be rebuffed by Sybbie, to be snapped at, to be attacked. But the girl only stared at him. George was torn all day. He had wanted to leave Sybbie behind in Cairo, but she had insisted on coming. She wanted to be a Ranger, just like him. It was something romantic in her mind. But now she saw the harsh reality of it. It was all fun and games at first, putting on a sexy and colorful costume, playing a Hollywood comedy with Nazi officers, assuring them that there was nothing out here. The girl had been important to luring their enemy into the trap, to stop them from blowing the only watering wells from here to Jerusalem. And maybe there was something fun about George's rescue of her, the two of them racing off into the sunset as Arabs chased after their valiant steed, firing at them. But now Sybbie saw what she had actually been doing. She had crouched by George's side as he and the volunteers wiped out wave after wave of men. Some wore tan helmet and cap. Others wore desert robes, checkered Keffiyah, and black headband. When it was over, there were piles of them on the fields. They were men that Sybbie's acting and 'fun' had led here, to their deaths.

It was a hard day when you realized what the world, what man, was capable of. It was a lesson that George Crawley had learned young, and it was something that he didn't want anyone he loved to ever follow. Tonight, the fun loving, always energetic, Lady Sybil Branson didn't know what to do. She didn't know if she hated George for all of this, or if she loved him even more, cherished him in sight of so much loss of life today. All the young man wanted to do was hold her till the horror in her heart passed.

But there was no time.

"What'd ya got?" he asked callously. He didn't know what voice to use with her, what she'd respond too, so he used his commander voice. The girl blinked. He thought she'd curse at him, cry into his chest, or run off in sobs. But instead she turned back to the field.

"There's a MG-34 nest, set up twenty meters to the right of the corridor. I'd give it's visibility about thirty yards." She explained giving him the binoculars and pointing to the enemy positions. George had asked her to scan the sentry area and see what was immediately in front of them. She had done it for hours. Now, in the dead of the night, she was confident in her assessment, though she didn't know what George wanted with that information.

"O'Rourke …" George called out as he looked through their binoculars.

"Aye?" The man walked forward.

"Lady Sybil is going to be your spotter. When I send word up the line, I want your mortar team to hit that MG nest and everything behind it for thirty seconds." He pointed out the position.

The artillery chief lifted his field glasses and looked over the walls. "I see it, but, uh …" He trailed off, refusing to look at George and Sybbie. It became awkward as it drew on.

"But what?" George asked.

"Well …" The Leftenant cleared his throat. "The lass?" He motioned to Sybbie. "Are you sure you want a Lady, and I mean a "Lady" from a big house, calling the shots for m'guns, Commander?" He asked.

"Lady Sybil Branson …" Sybbie cut in with a hostile introduction, clearly annoyed that she was being talked about like she wasn't there. "Three time Academic Triathlon Champion, Cambridge, Oxford, and London. Under Graduates Degrees in mathematics and engineering, London University, seventeen years old. Two years of Graduate school in advanced Mechanical Engineering, Oxford." She began to list off. "Let's say I've got an eye for numbers you Calvinist Dwarf!" The girl finished sharply slamming her sleek belly against the small Scot's gut in bravado.

The man swaggered up to the beauty. "I don't even know what all that means … but it's posh enough, I reckon." He pushed Sybbie back with his gut against her belly in response.

"Alright!" George chuckled. He got in between them, restraining the girl in an embrace and walking her back with a couple of waddles before she got punchy.

But when he turned his head, the Scot instead, turned toward the battlements. "Alright, Lassy, you point m'guns, and I'll foock'em in the arse." He seemed strangely satisfied with the arrangements after the minor blow up, surveying the area they wanted to hit.

Despite her claims at worldliness, there was a still a bit of Downton in the somewhat shocked look she gave George at O'Rourke's candor. But the young man just shrugged, handing her back their binoculars. She wanted to get out and see the world. She had worked for her Father and Mama's car company enough to know that people spoke that way, but never in front of the bosses' daughter. But, here, there was a casual uncaring to the vulgarity of the fighting men that braced a young girl far from the drawing rooms and country dinner parties of home.

She watched as George buttoned the middle three buttons on his leather jacket to cover the girl's naked torso. He looked her in the eye, breathing quietly, but didn't say anything. She frowned in confusion of his lack of words. But he scrubbed her waist, generating warmth for her hips and ribs.

"What?" She asked, breathing shallowly at the blessed warmth of his action, the leather coat, and George's residual body warmth inside the coat.

But he only kissed her forehead, and cupped her cheeks. He looked serious, taking her fragile face in his hands gently. He gave her nose a nip with his in a parting gesture that scared her. They never say goodbye to each other, not ever. They never say I love you, or that they were sorry. But in one tiny gesture it said all three without saying anything. He looked guilty all evening, but it wasn't there now as he left her.

"Sarge …" George called out to the four Indian riflemen that were loading their weapons. "Tees doosare bamabaaree aur phir main jaata hoon yaad. Mat karo!" He said in Hindi to the man with a sergeant's rank insignia pinned to the center of his Turban. The man gave a cocky laugh.

"My friend, when have I ever let you down, eh?!" Some people only lived when the stakes were high. The Sergeant who was grinning ear to ear in excitement was a tea bag, at his strongest flavor when the water was hot.

"Thirty seconds, O'Rourke …" He said in parting as he began climbing down the crumbling tower steps to the yard.

"Aye, sir, thirty seconds." The old engineer confirmed with a mutter, checking his pocket watch.

Dark blue eyes of a girl watched the shadowed silhouette disappear into the dark. She looked over her shoulder to stare at the dark yard. There were two, dug in, Mortar positions close to the wall at the center, and a light artillery gun on the other side of the main wall. The Howitzer was posted near a pen where the local provincial mounted Militia kept their horses. She waited to see George appear near the mortar position or in the barrack area where the men camped. But he didn't. He must have been on the palisades, she thought in confusion. But the questions came and went with a shake of her head.

"Number One, adjust ten degrees up, at a range of … fifty yards." She ordered, looking through George and her binoculars at the machine gun nest.

"Number One, ten degrees at fifty yards!" O'Rourke called to the yard.

"Aye, sir, ten by fifty!"

"Number Two, Thirty degrees up, at two hundred yards." She looked over at a large tent in the distance. The Nazis had segregated the camp between Arabs and German. She figured that the Arab ammunition and archaeological munitions had to be in that area. The SS Colonel had to figure that they were fighting farmers with pitchforks, or he wouldn't put the explosives so close. "That'll turn some hair white." She smirked to herself.

"Number Two, thirty degrees at two-hundred!"

"Thirty by two-hundred, sir!"

"Two shells per team." Sybbie ordered.

"Two shells at thirty seconds, boys! Number one, first! Number Two on eight second delay!"

A young boy with olive skin, long white shirt, black baggy pants, and a kippah on the crown of his head of dark curls ran up the castle steps. If they were in England that boy would be asleep right now, and in the morning be going to school. But here, he was with his uncles, cousins, brothers, and father. Even a boy as young as eight, was expected to do his part to defend his ancestral home.

"Sir …" The young runner gave a salute to the Scotsman.

"What is it, Laddy?" He asked.

"Commander Crawley says to fire when ready, sir." He reported.

The Scotsmen saluted the boy. "Thank you m'boy, best news I've heard all fooking year." He sounded exhilarated at the prospect of the 'fireworks show' that was about to be unleashed.

"Well, Live or Die, Lassy. Live or Die …" O'Rourke sighed as he waited for her.

Sybbie felt a chill go down her spine. She had watched men die today, but she had only watched. She loaded the rifles for George, ducked low behind the retaining wall. When he went empty, she handed him a freshly loaded one, cycling them throughout the battle. Bullets ricocheted off the wood and ancient stone palisade above her head which caused George to duck, shielding her with his body. The closest she had come to the battle was the sound of German submachine guns firing close to the line as they attempted to overrun the position. But she certainly hadn't killed anyone. But that was about to change and she gave herself a moment to ponder her last moment of innocence.

She gave a long frothing sigh.

"Brick and Prime …" She channeled her Mama in tone, her insides clenched.

"Prepare to fire!"

"Number One, ready!"

"Number Two, ready!"

Sybbie thought she might be sick as she watched two Nazi soldiers, two humans, sitting around, smoking and drinking from their canteen. They were huddled together behind a sandbagged position, having no idea what was coming. She held her breath and flooded her mind with the crying girl being spit on and smacked with shoes, being forced to her knees, not even being told to bend over as she protected her baby girl. She filled her heart with hate, a deep hate.

"Fire."

"Number One, Fire!" O'Rourke yelled, as he began timing his pocket watch.

There was an odd warped noise of releasing pressure of a mechanism. It sounded to Sybbie like a cork being unplugged by Thomas in the back during a Downton dinner. But it was much louder than that as she heard the audible velocity of something metal being arced over her head. It gave a long and loud whistle as it flew over the Crusader walls and toward the Nazi picket. She watched a mixture of fire and dirt impact in front of the machine gun nest. One Nazi gunner was blown backward while the other ducked under the gun.

"Leftenant, adjust elevation by one point two degrees."

"Number One, adjust fire one point two degree's!"

"Aye, sir!"

The girl in the belly dancer outfit covered by a too big leather coat heard a second plunk and moved her sight over to the large pavilion behind the sentry lines. The explosion missed by two yards, the mortar round hitting a conjoining tent. She watched bushels of salted goat and tropical fruit fly in the air with a white canopy aflame. By that time Freedom Fighters and Stormtroopers were dashing for cover in the shrubs and behind rocks. The entire camp was in chaos at the realization that the defenders had mortars.

"Number Two, adjust ten yards."

"Number Two, Adjust fire by ten yards!"

"Adjusting ten yards, aye, sir!"

When the short range mortar fired again, she turned back to the machine gun nest. The now lone Nazi soldier was attempting to load the sleek MG-34 when the mortar round landed. If it was basketball it would be a three pointer and in golf it would be a birdy. Sybbie's direction had landed the shell right clean in the hole. The explosion sent limbs of the SS soldier flying high in the air with the machine gun parts. She tried not to think about that, or ever linger on the imagery of it for as long as she lived.

 **ROOOWM!**

A large fire ball shook the ground under them. Pieces of loose stone and rivers of dirt had come tumbling down from the walls of the Templar fortress. The second mortar had hit home, striking the munitions pavilion dead center. A large and devastating fireball ripped through the German side of the siege camp. It incinerated anything within forty yards. Tents, cooking wear, and men disappeared, leaving only skeletons and melted aluminum. All that was left of the digging equipment and ammunition was a charred crater and flaming crates that rained on top of other tents, causing more fires.

Slowly Sybbie lowered her field glasses and watched from afar as the Nazi and Arab camps burned. Shadows fleeing here and there, retrieving water from the trucks to put out the flames, some Arabs grabbing their things and fleeing back home. And all of it was caused by one teenage girl with binoculars and a deep understanding of math. It was hard to fathom, in the moment, that Lady Sybil Branson, the daughter of a chauffeur, caused this much chaos in thirty seconds.

"Well … congratulations, Lassy." O'Rourke came up to her and patted her on the shoulder. "I ain't never touching a woman again." He admitted with a shake of his head. The girl turned to stare at the Scotsman with a deep frown. But what was more confusing was that the engineer actually had tears in his eyes as he was emotionally moved by the chaos below.

"All their charms are wasted on me, M'Lady. I'll never be as happy as I am, right now."

The girl rolled her eyes at the emotional artillery chief with a shake of her head. But, then, she saw a flicker of movement in the corner of her sight. She turned to see the Indian Sergeant motioned with a nod and the point of two fingers to someone down by the palisade. The girl watched him and another rifleman move from cover and into a firing position from the gape of the tower's retaining curtain wall. She turned to see that the volunteers and Militia came running from their camp places to the palisade to watch something.

"What the blazes?!" An adviser called out in alarm. Sybbie took a step forward and looked herself, joined by other officers.

A figure covered in strobing shadows from the fire and chaos of the Nazi siege lines, climbed over the palisade wall from the defender's side. They all watched him began creeping down the hillside unseen, using the rocks and dead Nazi bodies to hike down. It took two seconds to realize who it was and a sudden coldness numbed the girl inside out. Her blue eyes bulged and his name died in her throat as she began to pant.

"What in the fook is that arsehole playin at?!" O'Rourke gasped in the girl's ear. But if he wanted Sybbie to answer, he'd be waiting, because, she couldn't even say words. Like everyone else, Lady Sybil was stupefied by what was going on.

The minute George Crawley hit even ground he didn't hesitate. He took off as if he had been fired from a gun barrel right for the Nazi lines. He kicked up a trail of dirt as he sprinted faster than anyone had ever seen anyone run before. He didn't cover ground, he ate it, his arms pumping ear to pocket. He was chasing a ghost, a little boy just ahead of him. The cold was in his lungs, the sand was snow, and the fire ahead of him was the ending of his world. For a long moment Sybbie swore she was seven years old again, in her Aunt Edith's arms, excited to see her Aunt Mary's new baby. She'd never forget seeing that same speeding figure, like a comet, flash by. Now, years later, she saw the same sight. George Crawley's back, kicking up a trail. Even as a woman grown, with worldly experience, and education …

He was still the fastest man that ever lived to her.

The entire assembly of dumbfounded soldiers and officers on the command tower tensed when right in George's path two Arab sentries appeared from behind brush. One was armed with a German Mauser and the other was a swordsman armed with a curved blade. The two men looked just as shocked and confused as George's contemporaries to see the young man running toward them. Half in fear and half in adrenaline, the swordsman ululated and flipped his sword as the speeding comet came dashing right for them.

 **CRUFCK!**

 **CRUFCK!**

The sound of Enfield rifles cracked loudly and distinctively from the top of the tower. Their shots pierced the layered Arab fighters, the rifleman in the chest and the swordsman right through the neck. His high pitched wailing cries turned to choked gasps as he gripped his obliterated neck and withered on the ground. Yet, George didn't break his stride. He ran right through them, vaulting over the smoking crater that used to be the machine gun nest landing with a boost of acceleration.

Sybbie only took time to glance with everyone else up the flight of crumbling steps to the highest peak of the round tower. Two Indian riflemen were perched into firing positions, their comrades huddled around them tensely, they were ready to quickly cycle fresh loaded rifles to their Sergeant and Corporal who was covering George's run. They had no expression on their faces as they cocked the bolts in unison, the sound of their shell casings clicking on ancient stone.

Fogging breath trailed behind George's head as he ran through the Arab picket line. He accelerated past the angle that two other enemy soldiers had as they came rushing up, seeing the intruder. An unarmed Nazi who was still holding his pants up with one hand and holding toilet paper in the other was pointing to a passing George and screaming broken Arabic at the man racing next to him. The Arab man had a gilded Jezail in hand, powdering the pan as the young Ranger outran them. He closed the pan on the flintlock rifle and fired at George from the hip. The sound of hammer hitting metal and a booming, smoky, explosion illuminated the night. But feeling the hit coming, George jerked out of the way just as the Arab was touching the trigger. The shot whizzed by his shoulder. But before the Militiaman could start to reload, an explosion of blood and bone fragment erupted in his chest as he was shot through the back from above.

No one fathomed just what the young Ranger Commander was doing, especially now that he was out of range of sharpshooter cover. But that changed when George "The Comet" Crawley went dead sprint right for the abandoned naked corpse of the decapitated girl. A shirtless Stormtrooper came rushing toward him, and knelt to fire. But, as he aimed, George went into a baseball slide. The shot bounced off the ground and the Nazi got a face full of dust. The man dropped his rifle and began furiously wiping at his eyes. Mid-slide, the young man quickly tossed over the dead woman's corpse and pulled the sleeping baby girl underneath to him. In one smooth motion, George popped back to his feet and began running back toward the castle with her under arm. Arab and German's alike began seeing what was going on and quickly began to pursue furiously.

Before, there had been a shock on both sides of the conflict about what had been really happening the minute George leapt over the palisade. Only the Indian Riflemen knowing for sure what the teenager was doing. But now that it became clear that the Ranger Commander had set the whole thing up just to rescue one trapped, abandoned, and condemned Jewish baby girl, the quiet had ended. Before, when they saw George sprinting toward the Nazi lines, the Hebrew fighters gave sporadic vocal support to their brave comrade for whatever he was doing. But, the moment that they saw that George had gotten the baby, the Jewish Militia on the walls and behind the palisade began to cheer wildly and fervently.

Though they had won the day, the sight of one of their women so humiliated and brutally murdered, it affected them deeply and had brought them low. But, now, all the anger, the pain, and the helplessness turned to pure passion at such an inspiring sight of pure courage from a gentile for one of their innocent ones. On the other side it was a matter of morale, of pride, to the Nazis. They had been beaten badly and their only save of face was the example they had made of the Jews they caught. It would be devastating to "Hitler's Own" if their 'moral' victory was snatched away by one slippery youth.

The whole castle was rocking with Hebrew cheers and chants, encouraging the young man home as he ran under a hail of bullets. Meanwhile jeers in German and Arabic accompanied fleet footed shadows armed with swords and machetes. From above, the minute they were back in range, one by one, the pursuers ate lead and dirt. But just when it looked like it would be all clear, suddenly a speeding shadow came rocketing from the Nazi line. Armed with a sword that was already stained with the blood of the bawling toddler's mother, the Militia Captain started to catch his prey. George Crawley was fast enough for qualifying competition, but the Arab was an Olympic caliber athlete in a foot race. His dust trailed was bigger, and he ran as if he had a race car motor inside him. He came charging at George and the baby at an angle, sword brandished to strike. They were within steps of the steep hill, pilled with Nazi and Arab dead, which led to the palisade. If he reached there as George did, it would be over …

And it was.

 **KRAFCK!**

The stopping power of Sarge's bullet when it hit the speeding Arab Captain, right between the eyes, caused towel, head ban, and outer clothing to tear from the man's body. His back bent awkwardly, breaking backward, twisting his limbs strangely as he hit dirt and rock like he had jumped from a moving car. He skidded many feet from where he had been shot, till his body was a mess of oddly twisted up limbs.

But George was in the clear.

The men helped him up over the wall of wooden stakes. They cheered, shaking their fists victoriously out at the Nazi siege lines. Dozens of hands reached out to pat the young hero on the shoulder and back. Old men kissed the bawling and frightened baby on the cheek and head, petting her soft dark curls that were caked with sand. Panting and out of breath, George just nodded and shook hands of his admirers. He eventually handed the baby girl off the town rabbi. The man, with tears in his eyes, both of sorrow and joy, lifted the girl on high. The overjoyed men reached up to pet and bless the girl, breaking into a Hebrew song of joy and thanks to God in an emotional baritone. Soon all who knew it began to sing as they led the naked toddler to the camp where she could be bathed, clothed, and fed.

When the adoration had died down, George sank down, hunched over, hands on his knees. He breathed heavily, feeling as if his chest was going to explode. He hadn't thought about his physical exertion when he had been out there. He only thought of a little girl, a toddler, in trouble. The cold air hitting his face, her cries, it was like yesterday all over again.

"Didn't I tell you, my friend? Didn't Sarge tell you that it would work?!"

The Indian marksman was laughing gleefully. He descended the steps two at a time, his men trailing behind him. When they reached George, the youth shook each man's hand in thanks.

"I told you, didn't I tell him? I see into the future, I know everything." He clapped the breathless man on the back with a loud pop.

"Yeah …" George breathed. "Maybe I should start listening to you more." He patted him on the side as he breathed harshly.

The Indian man just nodded gravely. "Yes, because, when you fuck your mother, she'll call out your father's name when you finish inside her … and then you die." He explained seriously.

There was a long pause till George hitched a sigh to his exhale. "Alright, maybe not that much more." He rolled his eyes with a shake of his head.

The rest of the men laughed as they parted company. George was left perplexed once again of the prediction that had some truth in it. Knowing the question of the greater kill count between George's revolver or Lady Mary's bed would be a photo finish.

"What the bloody, blasted, hell was that, George?!"

Lord Hugh MacClare, Marquis of Flintshire, and overall commander of the expedition stalked over to him. He wore a British Military uniform with diplomatic stripes and a walking crop.

George looked up with a deep sincerity. "Closure." He said was a steadiness to the purpose in his voice. There was an old ghost in his eyes that was visible to Shrimpie. It stopped him cold and though he wished to say a few more things to the young man, he simply nodded.

"You know …" He pointed the crop in the direction of a Country Estate thousands of miles away. "If your mother had seen that, she'd be very upset, very upset, indeed." He gave him a knowing and serious look.

There was a breathless chuckle of mirth. "Only that I'm still breathing." He shook his head.

There was a look of annoyance in the flippant answer but the old man relented. "Perhaps, but Cora probably felt that one in her bones, sir." He said with a paternal scorn.

Nodding in agreement, George smirked. "I won't tell if you don't …" He quirked a cheeky eyebrow.

There was a grudging grand-paternal endearment toward the young hero that the Lord wished wasn't there. He gave a beaten scoff. Shrimpie had been the one to alert the county levies of the incoming Nazi expedition. While the aristocracy remained enamored with Hitler, willing to bow backwards to appease the charismatic leader of Germany, not everyone was kissing his jackboots. Petitioning Undersecretary Winston Churchill's permission to draft an army of volunteers, The Marquis of Flintshire had quietly recruit detachments from Commonwealth units and local levies to meet the German and Arab expedition. He acquired just enough military equipment not to be noticed by the foreign office. Having called up the Colonial Rangers, George left behind the racing circuit to reform the unit. The youth had been the eyes and ears of the informal army of Hebrew Militias and Royal detachments. It had been his job to lure his old nemesis from Spain into battle. Though his methods had made Shrimpie uncomfortable, George was the best they had in the fight.

"Please, George, no more dashing and dare." He tapped the crop into his palm. "Help me at least _feel_ that I'm in control of this rag-tag-band." He sighed in annoyance.

"Yes, sir." He saluted with two fingers. The Marquis tapped the crop to the brim of his cap in response and stalked away with a shake of his head.

But just as he caught his breath, he blacked out for a second, and found himself staring up at the night sky. He was only vaguely aware that someone had sucker punched him. When his ears stopped ringing they were filled with laughter from the men around him. He was in the dirt, hand rubbing his jaw where he had been punched. A girl in a silky belly dancer's skirt and a too big leather coat, which came down to her knees, stood over him. He was confused in a scrabbled mind from the hit who it was. But then he remembered that there was only one person who could sucker punch him that hard.

"You're a horrid person, George Crawley!" Sybbie shouted at him in a seething rage.

The young man rubbed his stubbled jaw tenderly and glared. "Is that what saving a kid is considered these days?" He asked sarcastically. "No good deed, that right, Syb?" He grunted.

But when he was ready to rile her up even more in her angered state, which was a tradition that dated back to childhood, he stopped his prodding. The girl had tears streaming down her face and she looked petrified. It made him feel awful inside, as awful as after the young mother had been murdered and he finally let Sybbie up. He'd never forget that look that was so betrayed for him having stopped her from doing something, even if they were out of range. He felt like everything he had done today continuously hurt her more and more.

When the girl swooped down on him, he lifted his hands up in a boxer's defense, ready to get pelted with angry Irish fists. But instead the girl fell on him and wrapped her arms around his neck. She had been angry at George for letting that mother die. She had been angry at George for swinging her emotions in the opposite way by risking his life to save the baby girl. And she had been angry at him for thinking that her love for him was ever in danger. But in reality the day had finally caught up with her, all the fighting, all the death, and all the close calls. It was the first battle that Sybbie had ever been a part of, and she couldn't hold in her emotions anymore. She needed a moment, needed somewhere safe to decompress.

So she fled to the only place she ever felt safe.

The onlookers turned away out of earned respect to give the emotional loved ones privacy. George pulled the girl in his lap and held her tightly. He pelted her pained and frightened face with kisses, before bury his nose into her pale cheek. "It's alright … we're alright." He whispered into her skin, kissing her tears, rocking her back and forth. "I'm sorry … I'm sorry, Sybbie." He said as she sobbed angrily into his ear, nuzzling it. All the rage and fears of a never ending nightmare washed over her in the stillness of a quiet battlefield. But he held her closely, allowing her to let it all out on him. He knew that tomorrow wouldn't get any easier …

But, tonight, they felt like they could make it, as long as they had each other.

* * *

 **Acknowledgements**

"The Atlantean Sword" – Basil Poledouris (The Willow Tree & Old Slave)

"Recovery" – Basil Poledouris (The Final Goodbye)

"The Courier" – Randy Edelman & Trevor Jones (Rescuing the stranded baby)

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _Boy the things you guys don't know about the struggle with these upcoming chapters …_

 _I've got to put out a few disclaimers._

 _The battle at the old Templar fortress is completely fictional. At no times in my research have I come across any instances in which The German Army and Arab Militias (officially) joined forces. However the atrocities against Jews as written were, sadly, all too common during the Arab revolts of 1936-1939 in Israel, and continue on into modern days. The brutality was then answered in kind by British soldiers against the Arabs._

 _Yes, that final section was definitely a tribute to "Last of the Mohicans" amongst several things. I kinda took that with both hands, I don't care. I always loved that scene since I was a little kid and have been waiting years to find a way to incorporate it in a story with a new twist._

 _Sybbie's outfit is actually not what you think that is. There's a fairly alright Jessica Brown Findlay movie called "Albatross" with Felicity Jones (two of my favorite actresses) and that's actually a reference to that movie (You kinda have to watch it to get it.) So it's kinda a reference of a reference?_

 _This story chalk-full of little Easter Eggs for other stuff. Like, I'm sure Hardcore Downton fans know exactly where "Little Lady Mary" came from. So, I'm kinda of a mega geek, and I love to do shit like that. I mean, most Marigold scenes are written to "Zelda's Lullaby", because, Marigold kinda looks like Princess Zelda in my head. Meanwhile Jessica De Gouw in Dracula is kinda my template for Sybbie. So if you think it's a reference to something in a story, it probably is._

 _Before I go … you guys, you don't have to review as guests all the time. I swear, I'm not gonna bother you with PMs … unless you're Mcfanciful, but she contacted me first, so, you know, she's the one who fucked up. Everyone else, I promise I won't bother you, unless you ask a question, then, I'll answer it. But other than that, you don't have to keep using guest if you're a member of the site._

 _Seriously, it makes me feel like I'm running the town brothel with all the people giving patronage anonymously._


	24. The Queen and the Soldier - Part III

**The Queen and the Soldier – Part III**

" _How come you won't talk about it?"_

" _Talk about what?"_

" _Your first time …"_

 _There was no light, no visibility in the bedroom. The windows were closed, the shades drawn, and door locked. No one was getting inside unless they wanted to break the door down, and by the time they did, a loaded revolver would be waiting. It was usually the way George Crawley slept in any place that wasn't his home, and so it had become the way Sybbie slept as well. That being the case, because, Sybbie Branson slept with George every night._

 _It was an old tradition that went all the way back to childhood. There was never a time that Sybbie hadn't a room, a bed, that wasn't her own. But somehow she always ended up snuggled with George come getting up time. It led many people, as they got older, to wonder about them. It was certainly juvenile to many and very unsettling, in assumed innuendo of their nocturnal activities, to others. And at least George knew that there was something odd about the business. But no one on his end had ever tried to discourage him from accepting her. His family knew that if they told George to send Sybbie back to her own room, he'd only give her half the space in his clothing drawers. But people had never questioned Sybbie about the weird personal tick._

 _It simply wasn't a dependency issue. Both of them had spent many years, some would say their most informative years, apart. Both had been instilled with different values. Sybbie was the princess, 'The Star' of the County Grantham. Everyone, from relatives to staff, had a hand in raising the fairy tale beauty with raven hair and ivory skin. Meanwhile, George was the lone wolf. He was the exiled knight on a great quest, in search of meaning. He raised himself with morals that were intrinsic to his father's genes and tested by circumstances and experience in the hardships of Depression. By all rights, the two should hate one another, and yet every night they didn't even bother with pretenses here in Cairo like they had at Downton. Sybbie and George slipped under the covers, Sybbie hit the light, and they slept._

 _But, on this cold desert night, when the moonlight shimmered off the Nile, reflecting on the bedspread where their curtains cracked, George looked over his shoulder at the odd late night question. Sybbie usually slept with her arms up, searching for the coolness under the pillow. The pilot thought that his best friend had been sleeping. His back was the baseboard to her bare ribs that expanding against him in steady breaths. But when George turned his head to look behind him, he saw Sybbie staring up at their hotel ceiling, her blue eyes wide awake. She looked as if she had woken up with the question on her mind._

" _What?" He asked sleepily._

" _How come you don't talk about your first time?"_

" _My first time what?" He rolled his eyes in confusion._

" _The first time you had sex."_

 _He was surprised and taken aback about how easily and even her voice was. She sounded genuinely curious and innocent. The young man couldn't fathom where that question had come from, or why it was the first thing she thought of upon waking up in the middle of the night. His tired eyes looked extremely guilty suddenly as they stared out at the sliver of shimmering light projecting from the crack in the curtains._

" _Where did that come from?" He asked._

 _He felt her shrug into his shoulder blade. "You know mine …" She replied almost petulantly._

 _George rotated his jaw. "Yeah, everyone knows yours …" George grunted with an annoyed sigh and closed his eyes. He let his comment hang in the air, his attempt to shut down the questioning. He took a warning swipe at her. Had it been anyone else, he would be fine with the biting comment. But it wasn't just anyone, and his heart hurt even as it left his mouth. It was torment the more he let it sit between them._

 _With an exasperated sigh that was mostly apologetic, he turned over. Sybbie hadn't said anything, not denying it. But he knew she was wounded by his barbwire snip, hurt by the reminder of her sins against the people she loved. George pulled her against him deeply, burying his nose into the crook of her supple neck and kissing her with a chaste nip there on her ivory skin. His wordless apology was accepted when she turned her head and nuzzled her forehead against his nose lovingly. For a long a time they laid there, George breathed in her curls while Sybbie snuggled closer, mind cast afloat into the currents of the late African night. She was extremely vulnerable in these rare moments, and there was only one place to hide till morning when she'd not acknowledge these things happen. It was the one place she had hid her entire life, and that was in George's arms._

 _There were theories about why they were like this. No one really knew but two people in the whole world. Lady Grantham had saw but a taste of the abuse of Nanny West toward Sybbie, but the girl remembered it, no one knew how, and she didn't know either. It was a jumbled mess of hurt and sadness. But the only time she felt safe, felt happy, secure, was when she was with George. It was once again a moment in which Sybbie was supposed to have hated her cousin, the favored son of her abuser. But she had such strangely vivid memories of a woman taking away her scrabbled egg, saying that people like Sybbie didn't deserve special treatment. And when she left with a slam of the door, she watched a baby, slowly pull his small, squishy, body across their playpen. He taught himself to crawl just so he could get to her. Then with a big dumb smile, the baby buried his face in her tummy. He didn't know how to hug or kiss, to express his love through touch. But the baby knew that he loved that crying little girl, and that he was happy when she was._

 _Since that day, they were attached forever._

 _They had imprinted on one another for the rest of their lives. When they were apart, they were apart. But if they were close, they were inseparable. Even when George was living at Crawley House, Sybbie stayed over every weekend, and walked down in the mornings every weekday just to slip in with him to wake him up and have breakfast together. There were always nasty rumors about the two, and Lord and Lady Grantham had been warned that this 'unusual' behavior and the rumors it was generating were hurting Sybbie's prospects for a grand marriage. But they didn't do anything, because, there was nothing they could do. George was ingrained with a pathological need to protect Sybbie. Meanwhile, the girl was impelled to go to him. She'd always flee to the safety of his presence when she felt scared, sad, or vulnerable, knowing he'd always be there to bury his face in her belly with a big dumb grin. And that was the great tragedy of a girl so beautiful and filled with life. She didn't come to George every night, because, they were dependent. He knew she came to him, because, she was damaged. In some ways, Sybbie was worse than him._

 _George had lived in dangerous times, had seen some things, and had done some things in his life. But when he was involved in that violence, he was always a willing combatant, a part of it. There was nothing that 'just happened' to George Crawley. The boy had met trouble head on, and was the author of his own heart aches and chose the wars he fought. But for Sybbie Branson, all her darkness was never violent, and it always happened to her. There were things, secret things, that had been done to the lovely girl that she couldn't simply discuss with someone who knew what to say about them. George Crawley had made many friends from his adventures, from all walks of life and society, with shared experiences. But the sad truth was that Sybbie Branson, with the exception of Marigold, didn't have any friends. Till George returned, and gladly folded and introduced her into his circle of deep friendships, Sybbie was a very isolated girl that didn't have anyone to talk too. And it had been done to her purposefully by ambitious snakes disguised as the lovers of her Daddy and Mama. Sarah Bunting and Roger Sinclair had done much damage to a young and innocent Sybbie that had ruined her. And at night she was still wounded by the loneliness of their abuses, the things that both had done to her secretly, hidden from her loved ones. It was all still fresh as if they happened that night. That was why she sought George's bed, his arms, and his hands in the night which absently messaged her belly till she could fall asleep again._

" _Was it as bad as mine?" She asked quietly. "Is that why you don't want to say?" There was something genuinely worried in her voice._

 _He knew that Sybbie was still haunted by the loss of her virginity. A rough fifteen minutes that ended with her naked, curled in a ball on the bed, scared of the blood, and crying from how much it hurt. Sinclair had viciously, breathlessly, mocked his nubile teenage lover that he had lusted after since he first saw her. He called her a 'pretty little baby who should be playing with dolls like her immature cousin, Marigold'. In the end, the lonely girl begged him not to be mad at her, pleaded for them to try again. She swore she'd learn to love all the things he wanted to do to her. She was determined to prove Sarah Bunting, her governess, wrong. The woman laughed in her face when she told her point blank that she loved Roger. Years of quiet mental abuse, of being told that she'd be the future Countess of Grantham someday, and that she didn't need a man, that she didn't need anyone. Her formative years filled with 'the cause', belabored that the agenda, the fight for equality, was all that mattered. Sinclair was Sybbie's ticket out, she thought he would save her from the isolation of the activist teacher, trying to reprogram her, break her into her creature. But, in the end, Sybbie had slipped smoothly from one abuser to another. Both were different, and yet, the same, only interested in an innocent girl's title and their own revenge on society._

 _It was as bad as it got._

 _George buried his face in her neck, held her tighter, and tried to contain his fury. A part of him wished that Sybbie had never told him any of that. When George returned to Downton, Sybbie was a girl deeply hurting, on the verge of dangerous desperation. Both her abusers tried to separate them, the rebel who should've been dead and their prized ticket to social change. They were Far Left and Far Right, a communist and a Nazi, pulling the beautiful gem of her Donk's eye apart in the same directions. But in the end they couldn't break George and Sybbie's bond. Both their thrall and reigns ended at George's gun point. Yet, every time it came up in his mind, all he wanted to do was act on his darker impulses. He wanted to kill them all over again, and curse that he had been compelled by cooler heads in those moments to allow them to escape with their lives._

 _But, tonight, he loved her for worrying that something like that happened to George, or at least something as worse. But he knew that he'd be lying if said no. So he kissed her head and laid his on top of hers, all in conformation of her fears. She turned and looked at him in the dark for a long moment._

" _I'm sorry …" She said with a low, loving sincerely._

 _George closed his eyes when he felt her peck his cheek. Then he sniffed and shook his head. "It, it wasn't like that …" he said knowingly. But, then, he got very grave. "But it wasn't good." Was all he allowed himself to tell her._

 _He remembered the sensation, the anger, and the fire turning to lust. He thought of Sybbie's first time with Sinclair and he shuttered. George felt, quietly, that he wasn't any different than Sinclair had been the night the teen had lost his virginity. He knew what it was like, the passion, the dominance, the borderline cruelty to conqueror. There was entitlement to the prize you wanted. And he knew what it was to take it, no matter the cost. He knew the feeling of making 'her' yours, forever, in a moment of madness and lust. He could imagine, thinking back, he might not have stopped either, even if a scared girl was whimpering and crying in his ear from the pain._

" _I don't talk about it …" he suddenly said. "Because … because, I'm ashamed of it, of myself and the way I acted." He said darkly._

 _Sybbie felt George completely slip her out of his spooning cuddle. When she looked over, she found that he had turned to lie on his back, hands behind his head. She saw the look of guilt on his face as he stared at the ceiling. He didn't feel comfortable holding her, when he thought of himself that night, and thought of the trauma Sybbie had gone through. For a frightened moment, George couldn't separate the two, though both were completely different circumstances. Yet, somehow, on that Egyptian night, the young man saw himself brutally slamming away at the girl next to him, her whimpered and teary "owws" unimportant in his bullish need to have her._

 _But the girl in question didn't let him stray far from her. She turned over and laid her head on his shoulder, tossing an arm across his chest. The girl slept in a silken brassier and matching underskirt. Her creamy torso and smooth bra pressed against his covered ribs. He sighed in annoyance when she grabbed his arm behind his head and wrapped it around her shoulders purposefully for him to hold her. She wasn't going to let him run away from her. She knew what was in his head, what he saw. But she wasn't going to let him think that, think that he had hurt her, not him, not the only person who knew her secret pain and built her back up after she destroyed her life to be with the real villain. George felt her hand cup his cheek and turn his head to look at her. In the dark he noticed how much she looked like their Granny. It was in the way she stared at him as she laid her head against his shoulder. They gazed into one another's eyes for a long time._

" _Did …" She hesitated. "Did she say, no?" She asked cautiously._

 _What scared George the most about the question was the way Sybbie looked at him. It wasn't that she dreaded the answer, or looked like she was hanging on every word he was saying, waiting to flee. What scared him was that if he had said yes, she wouldn't have done anything. The teenage girl had accepted many dark truths about her best friend. George had killed people. He had stolen and cheated his fellow man to survive. But tonight, as he lay in her arms, he saw in her eyes that there was nothing he could've done to make her leave. If he told Sybbie that he had forced a girl in some Fort Worth dive in the Stock Yards or some Mexican flower girl in a back alley at Dejalo, she'd still be there curled up with him. It was a frightening sometimes when you see how far, how deep, someone's unconditional love goes. And George was frightened, frightened that he'd use that love poorly someday as others had._

" _No …" He said truthfully. "It wasn't something that I should've done. But I didn't force her." George sounded deeply regretful. "I, uh … but I knew better." The guilt was palpable in his voice._

" _What was it, then?" She asked softly._

 _George was very distant. "You, uh, you remember that thing Marigold had. It was some Gala for the ballet company that Aunt Edith and Granny organized?" He asked._

 _The girl nodded absently. "She was being announced as the Prima Ballerina of the entire company for the Season. She was the youngest ever." There was pride in her voice._

" _She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw …" He added with sorrow and longing deeply embedded in his chest._

 _Sybbie stared at George. "What I remember is an arsehole going toe to toe with a Hungarian Count named Kurskov, who was the principle patron of the Company, and several of his men. Which, if you remember, the Company, afterward, then needed to find an alternate means of funding for the rest of the season." Blue eyes were accusatory._

 _There was a smirk on the pilot's face. "Yeah, but what a good looking son of bitch that asshole was though." He gave her a knowing look of humor._

 _The girl tightened her cheek and shrugged. "I disagree …" She pinched his nose playfully._

 _George chuckled. "Yeah, well … in my defense Kurskov did try to have me killed twice before that." He pointed out._

" _Sure, if we want to play it by that score, than you'd have to fight everyone who ever met you." She teased._

" _True enough …" George drew out. "But it was a good fight, though." He smirked in reverie of the moment and memory of the classiest brawl either had been too._

 _Sybbie scoffed. "Sometimes you make me wonder who's Irish between us …" She shook her head. But then after a pause she relented slyly. "But, it was a pretty good one." She smiled with a nod in nostalgic admiration. "Kinda wish I had money on it … four guys against one, who would've thought?" she sighed._

" _Meh, two guys, the other two went down hard pretty early."_

" _Well … they did warn 'Phantom of the Opera' about you when you came back home. Too bad he took that to mean try to kidnap Marigold when she rejected him." She shrugged. "I thought you were gonna kill him." The girl pointed out._

" _What makes you think I wasn't?" He asked darkly. "Donk saved his life by pulling me off of him." He added. "The others that came at me were just trying to protect their meal ticket. Too bad for them …" He snorted._

" _Marigold was the meal ticket. She's the reason anyone goes to the Ballet anyway. Though, you'd never think that with the way Marigold came at you. She screamed in your face that you were a sad, brooding, murderous ghost who never got anything right and makes everyone miserable." Sybbie wasn't joking anymore._

 _There was a deep hurt on George's face. "I remember …" He said quietly, the words reopening an old wound._

" _It's nothing compared to what you called her … I mean I couldn't tell the difference between Mama and …"_

" _I know …!" George cut Sybbie off with a moody snap. "I know what I said to her and who I sounded like. There's no need to remind me" He finished sadly._

 _She comforted innocently. "Count Dracula was hurting her, George. He was a jealous, spiteful, psychopath. He was absolutely obsessed with her, I mean …" She scoffed. "You, more than anyone, know how disturbed he was. I mean, for god sake, he had a mansion in France where he was gonna take her and lock her there so she could dance for his pleasure like she was a living figurine in a twisted music box. He was convinced that when she danced, she danced for him and him alone. You saved her life, alright? You did what you've always done for us, all of us. You protected her from someone who wanted to hurt her. I mean Aunt Edith and Granny wanted to give you the key to the city for what you did for Marigold … trust me, no one blames you."_

" _Marigold did … Told me that I ruined her life." George replied broodingly._

" _She didn't mean it."_

" _No, she did …" He nodded, eyes glassed over in the dark. "She sure did." He drew off in agreement with the girl he loved and his own conscious. "After that, Granny thought it would be better if I went home, in case someone wanted to call the police. And the woman that I … well, she went with me." He explained._

" _The first woman you had sex with was at Marigold's Gala?"_

 _George paused for a moment. "Yep, she was." He confirmed._

" _You knew her …?"_

" _You seem surprised?"_

" _I remember that guest list. Mama helped Granny and Aunt Edith put it together. The people she approves of don't seem like your type of people …" She pointed out. There was a long pause that caught the girl's attention. George began to talk like he was giving commentary to a projection of the events that was playing on the roof._

" _When we got back, the woman followed me home. No one was expecting me, and Grams was back at Downton with the nurses. So we were alone. That night was the anniversary of … something terrible that happened, and she didn't want to be alone." He explained._

" _Anniversary of what?" Sybbie asked in complete rapture of the story._

" _Something horrible, something I did. And on the night of the anniversary of that horrible thing I did, she was there, vulnerable, lost, and beautiful. I had spent all that night with Marigold's words in my head and, I guess, I was in such a dark place that I actually believed them. So I took advantage of my guest …" he drew out, with another shake of his head._

 _He had claimed her, made her his when she was completely off limits by any stretch of the words. "I don't know. I guess I felt like she owed me, she owed me something after she been so stupid for all those months back in …" He caught himself and then paused for a tense beat. "I saved her, and it cost me a childhood, and most of my friends a year later in New Orleans doing it. So, yeah, I guess I thought she owed me. So I kissed her and she kissed me back. Then, I bent her over the kitchen table and I took my payment in flesh." He shook his head with a shaky sigh._

 _It looked to physically pain him to relive that night, both nights._

" _After I was done, she pushed herself upright, pulled her knickers back up, put the back of her skirts down, and she kissed me. I was scared and ashamed after it all died down in me. I remember I took a rag from the kitchen sink and cleaned her … cleaned her … I wiped her between her legs while she nuzzled her nose to mine. I kept telling her how sorry I was, but she tried to convince me that I didn't do anything wrong, that we didn't do anything wrong. We loved each other and that's what people who love each other do. And … and that's when I knew that it was wrong what we did, what I did." He explained with a shake of his head._

 _Sybbie studied him innocently. Her mind suddenly racing with ideas, the girl was coming to realize who it could be. "Was it just one time?" She asked genuinely curious, morbidly so, with so many things on her mind suddenly._

" _I felt guilty afterward, felt like the worst person in the world. She kept telling me that it wasn't wrong, because, I loved her and she loved me. As long as we loved each other what we did was never wrong. So she spent the night to show me, to make me feel better. She got in bed, snuggled up like we used …" George was suddenly quiet after catching himself. "I swore that we wouldn't do it again, and she promised that we wouldn't speak of it. But then, in the morning, she was there, peaceful and beautiful. When she woke up, she smiled as she stretched and looked deeply into my eyes waiting, offering …" He drew off._

" _So you did it again?"_

" _To my everlasting shame … we did." George admitted grimly. "Afterward she kissed me, told me that she'd never forget what I've done for her and … and her family, and that she'd always love me. Then, she walked back home and by the next week she was back to her old self. Then, she went back home to her family, like nothing ever happened." He cleared his throat. When he finished, the young man's eyes had never had shame that had been so deep. George Crawley had done many dark things in his life …_

 _But nothing would ever match what he had done the night he lost his virginity._

* * *

"Have you gone completely mad?!"

"No, your lordship … it was his own decision."

"He was shot in the shoulder, stabbed in the leg, and swiped by his ribcage. He is a severally wounded man, Barrow! Does it seem like he could've made his own decisions?!"

"He was bleeding out, your Lordship. I didn't think there was time."

"Time enough to call one of us?"

"No, your Lordship, not even for that, I'm afraid."

"Afraid? You're afraid?!"

"Robert!"

"You burnt our child's flesh with a knife …!"

"Cauterized, Papa …"

"I don't bloody care what you call it. It's barbaric!"

"It was the only option, Master George was bleeding out."

"And how did that happen?!"

"No one was there to watch him … your Lordship."

"Easy, Thomas, you're flying perilously close to the sun."

"Forgive me, your Ladyship …"

Thomas Barrow stood at attention emotionlessly, with watery eyes that were far from calm. He was without livery coat, his sleeves done up. Visible suspenders held down his white dress shirt that was soaked with blood and sweat. He looked more like a field medic or battlefield surgeon than a butler. In front of him Lord Grantham was still dressed from dinner, his tail's coat left somewhere in the house and his vest unbuttoned. There was a bit of the devil in Robert Crawley as the older man raged at the butler. There was a spark of the old, impudent, and spiteful Mr. Barrow in the man's eyes. But empathy and maturity drove him down deep within.

It was hard not to understand how they all must have felt.

They had heard the first scream from the lobby, but for some reason they hadn't put it all together, till the second one. By the time Lord Grantham and Anna beat everyone else downstairs, George's leg and his back shoulder had been closed. But Lady Grantham, Lord Flintshire, and Lady Edith had been there along with the rest of the staff to see George burn the last of his wounds with his knife. With a faded growl, George had lost consciousness from the drain of the inhuman pain he gritted down, letting the cooling knife hit the ground, sparks flying off the metal when it clattered to the kitchen floor. It had been a traumatizing sight for the Lords and Ladies who saw such a rash and brutal sight, most for the first time. But for Thomas he had run out of words. He had been shocked when Master George burned his first wound closed, he had been begging him to stop when he closed the bullet hole on his back shoulder, and all the butler could do was cry watching him do the other side. They had all left him behind to tend to the business of what to do, leaving only Thomas to watch him. The last thing they wanted was to come in to see George preforming scarring surgery on his self, while the man who was supposed to be in charge watched and cried.

Now that their boy had closed the wounds, there would be hell to pay. And Mr. Barrow had been taking the brunt of the punishment since he was ordered upstairs, while Mr. and Mrs. Bates volunteered to watch the young hero. If Thomas had been in Lord Grantham's position, saw one of the young maids or Mr. Mosley standing around, crying, while Master George had done something so horrifying to himself, he'd be just as angry. So he took the brunt of the rage with no flicker of emotion on his face. Meanwhile Robert paced and snarled like an animal in a cage who wanted to get at Barrow, get at Hitler, get at the world for delivering their prodigal son back home like this, so badly wounded.

"If I could, Barrow, I'd have you out of this house tonight!" It was a helpless anger that made the old man's words so growled and dark when he snarled at the butler.

"Of course your Lordship. I'll tenure my resignation. That is, assuming my employer accepts it." He bowed his head.

Lord Grantham's eyes were afire. "What did you say?!" He snarled.

Thomas knew he shouldn't have said that. He wished he could take it back, but in such flayed nerves it was hard to hide the old Thomas that was filled with that old anger at the world. He knew that it was still one of the Downton scandals that would never fully heal. The old man would ever grudge that he had to swallow the fact that all of the household staff was employed by Master George and not Lord Grantham.

Back in summer of 1936, Robert Crawley had wanted his grandson to manage Downton for a month or two. It had been a guise to find him several female, high born, suitors. He used George's status as the Viscount of Downton Abbey, and his technical ownership of the house, as a carrot to dangle. Eventually, George agreed, under the stipulation that Robert Crawley put it in writing. It was something that Robert's father had refused to do all of his life. But Robert, finding it a small price to pay to bring his grandson home and delight his wife, agreed. However, the document was not read in perpetuity and Robert had ended up signing over all of the household staff's workmen's contracts over to the heir. When Robert returned, he came to realized that the staff, now belonged to George Crawley, paid out by a mysterious fortune emanating from the Metro Museum.

It was a cruel thing George did, everyone wouldn't deny it, but the young man wasn't himself. They had all told him that Isobel was sick, but they had never told him how sick. When he returned home, he found that his own grandmother, one of the only paternal figures in his childhood, couldn't even remember him anymore. He had been convinced that the family, Robert in particular, had held back all these years in spite. And the sad truth was that maybe it had been true. So George had taken his revenge in the most hurtful way. They stole something from him and he stole something of theirs in retribution. Lord Grantham and George refused to speak to each other after that.

Since then it had caused uncomfortable friction from time to time between the staff and the family. George had named Sybbie 'Lady of the House' as his heiress. So when it came time to discuss staffing matters or work evaluations, it was no longer Lord and Lady Grantham's duties but Miss Sybbie's. If one of the maids wasn't working out, it was a matter that Mrs. Hughes had to take up with Lady Sybil, not Lady Grantham. It also was uncomfortable that Lord Grantham knew that George had doubled all of their salaries before he left. The only people that the Crawley's could dismiss were Mr. and Mrs. Bates, and Mrs. Baxter. But they knew they'd never would, for even if they refused their services, they'd still be employed as their valet and Lady's Maids. The staff was happy for the security, but chaffed to be put in the position of attending people that they technically did not work for anymore.

"Robert, that's enough!" Lady Grantham snapped. "What's done is done." Her still gloved hand grabbed a part of his vest with chastisement. She was ever the voice of reason at the older man's shortening temper as the years passed. But, when Robert walked away, she shot Thomas a dark look. Out of respect, the butler lowered his head subserviently.

Lady Edith was worried sick as she sat on a plush sofa in the drawing room. She looked to be in hell. Her eyes were watery and tear streaks marred her made up face. She hadn't had time to touch up or clean her makeup, not in the middle of her worse nightmare. George was mangled, bloody, and slipping in and out of consciousness. Each time he closed his eyes, she was afraid that it would be for the final time. She had seen the face of war before, in almost every hall of the house, when it had been a make shift hospital. But it had never creeped so close to her. She had always worried about Matthew when he was wounded. They hadn't become close friends till after the war, but she cared for him. People often mocked her when she said that she loved him, but she did. In Edith's own way she had loved Matthew, maybe even more than she knew every time she thought of her courtship of Bertie and the kind of man he was and turned out to be. But George was different than Matthew.

George was her boy, no matter what anyone said, he was _her_ son.

Sometimes she thought she was the only one who ever loved him. No matter what he did, or how far he pushed all of them, she loved him unconditionally. Mary had accused her for years of trying to steal him from her, that her obsession with Matthew had bled over to their son. Mama always made her take those things back, but it still stung. No one seemed to believe that Edith truly loved George that much. And for the last four years it ate at her that she had never visited him, never checked on him in North Africa and Palestine. She was always an outlier in this family, why did she listen to them when it came to George? There wasn't a wild or dangerous place that Edith had not gone to find him in America, so why did she balk when he was across the sea? Why has she never gone to visit him, comfort him, when he was just a forty minute drive away? These were all the questions she had kept asking herself as she watched her papa rage and her mama clench her hands in her lap.

But it was worse than that, because, now she couldn't reach Marigold. It was horrible enough when George was missing, but now Marigold was too. She had called everyone she could when Thomas began working on George. She called the hospital in Leeds, Ripon, and Thirsk, trying to find a medic team to drive down to Downton. Then she had called Sybbie, who was in tears when she finally answered the phone after her third time calling the airbase. God only knows she wanted to hold that precious girl when she finally answered the barrack's phone. She was sobbing on the other line, openly, uncaringly, fore no one, no one, from their squadron had come back. In the middle of a storm she was all alone at the airdrome, there was nobody left. For the first time in so long Sybbie had sounded like a kid, when she asked her Aunt Edith, in tears, if she could come home. It only hit her harder to hear that George was wounded badly. But Edith assured her with all the love and comfort she had in her soul that her daddy was coming to get her. That she can, indeed, come home. It broke Edith's heart to have to hang up on her, she sounded so scared and alone, but she had to call Marigold.

But each time she tried, an operator answered, telling her that the line had been cut off completely. Edith had called and called again, trying to get information, before the head operator told her that she was one of thousands of people trying to get in touch with family and friends in York. She called her maid at their London flat, The Ballet Company, Fighter Control Command, and even the London Met. But no one knew where Marigold was. She even called King's Cross to enquire about trains in transit, but after a rebuke about giving out military information, she was hung up on when the air raid siren went off in the background.

She thought she was gonna pass out when she stumbled into the room. Anna had caught her and sat her down. Edith had never been more frightened in her life. Marigold was missing, George was bleeding out downstairs, and Sybbie was all alone in an abandoned airbase with a handful of frightened mechanics. It was more than she could bear. Even when Tom arrived, determined to bring both their girls home, she hadn't felt assured. With all of her heart she had wanted to go with him. But Edith had enough medical knowledge from the war to be Thomas's assistant, if he needed one. The two of them were the only thing that stood between George and death till the medical team arrived.

The golden woman was still dressed in her evening finery, her curls had fallen out and there was a lock of hair lying limply on her pale forehead. She felt herself in the eye of the storm, between full on meltdown, and numb ignorance of the uncertainty of the very minute she lived through. The war was different when the ones she loved were in it. Back then they all worried about Matthew, and the closest they got to this feeling was when Sybil had tried to put in for a transfer to the forward hospitals at the front, near Matthew's Regiment's defense line. Luckily she was denied, because, Doctor Clarkson could not spare her. But now that split second of imagining both Matthew and Sybil in the same trench being shelled by Hun's lived forever in her chest as now all of their children faced the same fate day after day. Now that fear had finally caught up with all of them. She could only pray that George survived the night, and that Tom and Sybbie could find Marigold.

"What … What does George need, Thomas?" Edith's voice shook, her eyes gazing distantly in the direction that the butler was nowhere near. She had to do something, she had to be useful, or else she'd die. She knew it in her heart. She'd die if she had sit one more minute as her world was crashing down.

The man turned to Edith. "He's closed the wounds, your Ladyship." Thomas nodded. "But not before he lost a lot of blood." He replied.

"Not too much?" Robert asked cautiously, whatever he had said to Thomas was long forgotten in a racing mind.

The butler sighed, voice cracking with emotion. "It's …" he cleared his throat. "It's hard to tell, without a hospital, I … I couldn't say." He sniffed, trying to gain composure.

"Is there any way we can … put more in?"

Shrimpie Flintshire was standing by the fire. The concerned old man was a family friend to the last, and a personal one of George's. He could never claim to be the boy's mentor; George Crawley would actually have to listen to someone first. But he cared deeply for George and Sybbie as if they were his own blood, as Lord and Lady Grantham cared for Rose's children.

"A blood transfusion?" Cora turned quickly to Thomas.

"There's still some old equipment in the basement from the war." Thomas said thoughtfully. "But I'm not sure of Master George's blood type …" He turned to Lady Grantham.

"It doesn't matter." Edith said quietly. "I'm O-Negative … 'Universal Donor' …" She stood up with purpose. "I'll give him whatever he needs, all of it if need be." Her voice was desperate.

"It's no good …" Thomas said absently. "You could keep him going, for a little bit, but he's gonna need at least a pint of his own type of blood, your Ladyship." He pointed out.

"We have it … I think." Cora announced hesitantly.

"Cora, are you sure?!" Robert dared to dream for a moment with shocked excitement.

"I talked to Isobel when George was born. She ran the tests on Mary and the baby after Matthew died." She explained. "According to Isobel, George and Mary shared something rare. I believe she called it a perfect "Histocompatibility Match", Clarkson agreed." She frowned.

"Blimey … that's a one hundred and eleven-to-one odds that." Thomas spouted out.

"What does it mean?" Robert asked in confusion.

"Master George has a complete identical organ make up to Lady Mary."

"…"

"They, uh, Master George's inner organs are the exact copy of Lady Mary's, made of the exact same tissue, down to their hearts." He explained unconfidently. There was a long pause from the occupants of the room.

"Does … that mean they have the same blood type?" Edith drew out with a hard frown of confusion.

"They'd have too, if they share the exact same organs … balls, is that possible?" Robert cut himself off and turned curiously to his wife in a moment of amazement. His Countess shrugged.

"It's what Isobel said." She sounded unsure, never really thinking about it before herself.

"It's extremely rare, but it happens, your Lordship." Thomas replied.

Shrimpy snorted tiredly. "If I were us, I'd keep that to ourselves." Shrimpie grunted. "I don't think George would be able to live with himself if he knew that there was no different between Lady Mary and himself when they're cut open." He shook his head in dark humor. There was a long pause between the occupants of the room, before everyone slowly nodded. Though it had been four years, they knew that if they let that secret out, it would be a fact too good for Mary not to lord over her child till he found a way to turn it on her.

"The cat's already out of the bag, I'm afraid …" Lady Grantham breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that there was some light at the end of the tunnel. "Just give him a few weeks to recover his strength …" She chuckled turning behind her.

But no one was there.

Cora frowned hard turning to Robert. "Where's Mary?!" She said indignantly.

Glaring, Lord Grantham turned and looked around the drawing room. But all he found was his wife, middle daughter, and Shrimpie. He gave another look around in deepening confusion. "Where is she?" He asked himself more than repeating his wife's shock.

"I didn't see her downstairs, your Lordship." Thomas replied.

"Barrow, go down and get Anna." Robert ordered, trouble deeply etched on his face.

"Right away …" He bowed slightly and turned to leave.

Just then the door opened, and as if she heard them, it was Anna Bates in the doorway. Behind the lady's maid was Lady Rachel, in a silk robe over a blue night slip. They both looked very worried and frightened as they pushed in on the family.

"Anna, where is Lady Mary …?" Robert was asking when he was cut off by his granddaughter.

"Donk … Grandpapa, you have to come quick!" The teenage girl looked scared. Anna clipped right off the heels of Lady Rachel.

"Your Lordship … it's Master George!"

Everyone got up and rushed to follow the maid and the young girl. But when they thought they were going to lead them downstairs, instead they were led to the library. Inside they heard Mr. Bates and the younger trying to get someone's attention and the clattered thumping of things falling to the floor. When they all entered they saw Bates and JJ standing off to the sides of a manic scene. Books and maps were strewn across the floor where they had been thrown when they were found useless.

"He's not far … He couldn't have taken her far … they're here, they're here, somewhere …"

George was limping back and forth, flipping manically through pages of books and throwing them on the floor. His dark blues eyes were hazy and distant, his mind in a completely different universe. He was sweating profusely. His black t-shirt was thrown on. The white of fresh bandages was shown through the hole in his shoulder where he was shot and the gash where a Hitler Youth Knife cut him under leather coat. The family watched him hobble back to the table, scribbling on a map of Egypt that Lord and Lady Grantham kept as a souvenir of their honeymoon. Their books of Egypt that they had once shown to their grandbabies were open and strewn over the table.

"She's here … she's here, I know it … I know it. He's got her here, somewhere …" George was scribbling fervently in coded notes with a pencil, while muttering feverishly. He was dividing the city of Cairo into sections, circling different places, while writing notes in a different language in the books.

There was one part confusion and one part fear on his family's faces as they watched the wounded man, manically, tear apart the library. He wasn't himself, he wasn't even the man that had faced the trauma he was reliving through hallucination. He was the internalized externalized, everything he was feeling, completely unfiltered. His reason and restraint was unconscious with the rest of the young man.

"He's here. He's here!" George said with panic in his voice. "That son of a bitch is here! I can smell that stench of a dead Frenchmen on him." He replied darkly. He began going over the map again, marking notes on where the airport would be half a century later from when his Donk and Granny had bought the map.

"What's going on?" Rachel asked timidly. She had stood apart from her family. Instead she found herself standing shoulder to shoulder with JJ. The young footman looked disturbed and deeply emotional seeing his hero so completely unhinged. No one but Anna seemed to notice that the girl was holding her son's hand comfortingly.

"He's hallucinating …" Thomas answered no one in particular. "It's the blood loss, your Lordship." He turned to Lord and Lady Grantham. "He doesn't know where he is." He explained.

"Obviously …!" Robert snapped. "Bates, what happened?" He asked, his eyes never leaving his grandson who was scribbling furiously, muttering to himself, tears in his eyes.

The valet turned to his master. "I dunno, your Lordship." He frowned. "He was having a nightmare of some sort, and then, suddenly, he was on his feet getting dressed. He seemed to be convinced that a young woman was in trouble. Anna and I tried to stop him, your Lordship, but he … well, sir, he wouldn't be denied." The valet motioned to his crippled leg and lingered on the insinuation of his petite wife's size verses a young fighter in the prime of his life.

"If I had rescued her, don't you think she'd be here?! Well … does she look like she's here?!"

Everyone was startled when George raised his voice. For a moment they thought he was talking to them. But instead, and most troubling, the young man was snapping at an empty space next to him, as if someone was there talking to him.

"Get off me …" He shrugged at nothing, as if he was bucking off their touch. "I got to save her, you understand me?!" he shouted at the phantom. "He's got her, don't you get it? I can't let anything happen to her!" He shook his head at the argument no one was giving. "Granny and Uncle Tom would never forgive me if I do!" He shuttered as he began to write again.

"Leave me be, goddamn it, woman!" George threw the book at nothing. The hard leather bound item made a thunderous thwack against Robert's desk. When the ghost of a young woman in a nurse's outfit disappeared, he went back to scribbling and muttering names in Arabic, using two fingers to walk across the map from the airfield to downtown, before marking it.

Cora looked heavily worried, her eyes deeply sympathetic, there was a part of her that was breaking every second that passed while he continued on. She watched her grandson, her child, suffer. He was trapped in a dark moment in his life, maybe the darkest, and no one was doing anything. She moved to go to him, too hold him, when suddenly, it was the butler who stopped her from continuing.

"No, your Ladyship, don't …" He shook his head. "Don't go near him." He warned.

A dark look was shot Thomas's way. "He's suffering, Thomas, I have to go to him, he's my baby!" She snapped at him. She tried to move forward, but Barrow halted her again.

"No!" He protested. "You don't understand!" He implored.

"Don't understand what?" Lord Grantham pressed angrily.

The butler looked behind him, then, he returned to the group watching disheartened as the youth continued to mutter and scribble. "He's lost a lot of blood, your Lordship." He explained. "Almost anyone would be unconscious. It's a miracle he's even walking …" He shook his head. "He's running on high adrenaline. If her Ladyship goes near him, there's a likelihood he won't trust what he's seeing and might hurt her, or worse …" he drew out.

Robert massaged his knuckled fist turned white, anxiously. "Good god!" He sighed in helpless exasperation.

Cora's eyes were wide as she watched George sweatily tear books from the shelf and throw them down after flipping through them. She bit her lip. "Well …" She turned to Thomas. "What do we do?" She asked desperately. There was a long moment in which the butler was quiet as books hit the rug, and pencil furiously scribbled in the background.

"Thomas!"

The man was startled and turned to the group of people that were hanging off every word, every breath, that the dapper servant had. But in the moment, he was scared, and he couldn't hide it. Thomas Barrow wasn't a doctor. He was a stretcher barer, he was an assistant to Nurse Crawley at the old hospital, and he was an administrator at Downton at the end of the war. Everything Thomas knew about medicine he had learned from Lady Sybil Crawley when he trailed her on her rounds. The girl had talent, but she didn't know everything, and Thomas only knew the basics. With all his heart he wanted to tell them that he had the answer, but the truth was that he didn't.

Thomas didn't know what to do.

Suddenly someone grabbed the butler by the suspenders and turned him. He was face to face with George, whose eyes were bloodshot. His young face aged ten years from the stress. Any longer and his hair might turn white. The pilot had a vice grip on his straps, pulling him close.

"Thomas?" he said as if he hadn't seen him in years. "Oh thank god!" He hugged the man tightly. But he quickly turned him loose. "Thomas, Thomas, listen to me … listen!" He shook him desperately. "He's got her, Thomas, he's got her!" His voice nearly snapped from how hard edged it was. "We had a fight and she stormed out. She was just getting air!" He shook the butler desperately. "She was just getting air and _the bastard_ took her! It's my fault, Thomas, my fault! I knew … I knew he was in town. But I was just so angry with her!" He shook his head.

"It's alright, Master George … it's gonna be alright!" Barrow braced his shoulders.

"No … No, it's not gonna be alright. He's got her, Thomas!" He breathed heavily. "He's gonna hurt her, he's gonna do bad things to her." He drifted off. "You gotta help me find her!" He shook him.

"You'll find her, Master George, I promise." He said shakily, unnerved being so close to a raving mad man.

"I know what this is …"

Everyone but George turned to Shrimpie who was watching. The old man looked darkly at the young man who was burying his face into Thomas Barrow's chest. The Marquis looked grave and sympathetic. He had never fully recovered from telling one horrible story tonight. He'd not tell the Crawley's another, especially, when his granddaughter was in the room.

"Lady Edith, take Mr. Bates downstairs and make the transfusion equipment and yourself ready." The old lord took control of the situation. Edith hesitated while Mr. Bates hobbled as quickly as he could to the door. There was something of the old soldier in the way the valet hopped too when an officer gave an order. "Anna, go find Lady Mary." He commanded.

"Your Lordship." She nodded, and left the room.

Before he took a step toward George, Shrimpie turned to Lord and Lady Grantham. "Robert, Cora, I must warn you …" He was deadly serious. "You wouldn't want to hear this." He looked very grave, indeed. "It might be hard …" He started.

"We'll endure, Shrimpie." Cora cut him off. "He's our child." She took Robert's hand.

The old man nodded, though it was clear it wasn't what he wanted. But he didn't protest as he took a deep breath. Then he strode forward, gaining George's attention. The young man looked up and immediately went to the man. Shrimpie looked hurt deep within to be here again, to hear this again, when George grabbed his lapels.

"Hugh!" George gritted his teeth in desperation. "He's got her, Hugh!" He shook him.

"Pamuk's got Sybbie!

The old man dared not look back at Lord and Lady Grantham. They knew that their eldest granddaughter had been kidnapped. They had worried and privately angst over the story before. But it was just a story then, something that happened while they were ignorant of it. Heard second hand, and abbreviated by the girl who'd rather not talk about it. But now it was more real than it had ever been before. They bore witness to what it had been like, what it felt like, when she was gone. It was as if it was happening for the very first time. And they couldn't shake the feelings of terror in their grandson's manic craze. Both Robert and Cora looked to have gotten old within moments of hearing George rant.

"I've torn Jerusalem apart! I've looked everywhere! I've raided every smuggler's den and Nazi tavern. No one knows where she is, Hugh, no one!" He breathed harshly. "It's been two weeks, two weeks and they could be anywhere! I've tried to get passage to Tehran, but the miserable sons of bitches at the foreign office won't help me!" He shook the old man. "She's here, she's in Cairo! She has to be!" He had tears in his eyes. "If they had taken her back to **The** **Witch** , I would've known by now! That psycho is hiding her on purpose, he's torturing me!" He was heaving, his eyes deep in pain. "I've got to get her back, Hugh!" He bowed his head.

"She's all … she's all I got left." He looked pathetic and worn down. "She's all the family I have anymore and he's taken her from me, he's had her for two weeks now. I, I can't let anything happen to her. She's all I got, Hugh. She's all I've got left in the world now." He looked broken.

It was an old ghost that gripped him, older than an event that took place two years ago. It was the same specter that reminded him of a snowy Christmas Eve. But it was so much worse than it had ever been before. The suffering, the torment, of this failure dragged on and on. He was supposed to protect her. Since they were babies, he hadn't known any other way. And every day she was gone, in the hands of a psychopath taught hatred since the cradle, the more it tore him apart. He had failed baby Cora and it destroyed him, but Sybbie was different. She had always been there, and she was everything to him. The raven haired girl with ivory skin was his sister, his partner, his best friend. George didn't think he could live without her. He couldn't fail again. He couldn't fail to rescue her. She was all he had left. Without her, George Crawley was completely alone in the world.

THWACK!

Suddenly the library erupted with the sound of hand to cheek. Cora let out a noise of surprise, gripping her shocked husband by the arm, placing her gloved hand to her open mouth. Shrimpie had, without warning, cracked George cross the face with a slap. It was hard enough to send sweat droplets flying on contact.

"Grandpapa!" Rachel gasped. But the old man ignored her.

"George …" Shrimpie said determinedly. "George, look at me me'laddy … look at me!" His voice was stern as he braced George's shoulders giving him a shake. The old man's voice cut through the thunder of anxiety and helplessness. The young man did as he was bade, eyes glassy and muddled. "Alemdar Pamuk is dead!" He shook him harshly. "You killed him, at the Cairo Museum a week later!" He reminded him with another shake. "You …" He hesitated, glancing briefly to his grandparents. "You killed him!" He shook his head, skipping the 'how' of the deed. "You saved Sybbie, you saved her, remember?" He nodded to encourage him.

"The museum …" George repeated cloudily. "He was hiding her at the museum." He blinked hard in memory.

"That's right, that's it, Lad." He coached. "He … He didn't hurt her, George … remember?"

"It was a trap, but ..." George drew off as a torrent of memories flooded in.

"But you stormed the place, fought off the assassins." Shrimpie finished.

"Sybbie, she was unhurt." He nodded.

"He treated her like a princess … she was fine George, she was alright. You saved her, you were a hero lad. You were a hero."

But to the comforts, George never heard. His mind was suddenly captured by something else about that night. It was something that only two people still alive knew about. "The reel … he showed me the film reel." He replied. "He showed me the movie, the truth …" He said dazedly.

"The truth about what, George?" Shrimpie frowned. This was a part of the story he had never heard, a piece of evidence he never saw at the crime scene.

"The movie …" He shook his head.

"What movie? What are you talking about?" The man frowned.

"I killed them, Hugh …" He turned to Shrimpie. "I killed them and … she wasn't even in danger." He looked utterly defeated. "I'm … I'm a murderer …"

"Rachel?! Rachel, my love, are you in here?"

The door creaked open and a slender figure swept inside obliviously. She was a gown woman, not old enough to be considered older, and far younger looking than other mother's her age thought fair. She wore her golden curls down. She was dressed for bed; a silver silk robe covered her perfect figure in a long, form fitting, satin nightgown. Her dark eyes were puffy and red from deep sorrow and long periods of crying. The woman looked as if a weight was on top of her, a ghost of herself in the wee hours of the night that her husband had died.

Lady Rose Aldridge, newly Dowager Countess of Sinderby, had been locked in her room with her children all night. She had lied in bed, holding onto her little boy tightly while she cried and slept, cried and slept. She hardly knew what time it was, marking it only by when Lady Grantham, Mary, and Edith came to see her in their evening gowns. She had woken up in the middle of the night and was frightened to find her daughter missing. Little Hugh had clung to her all night, the two crying together, both sharing a tender heart that could be easily hurt. But Rachel was her rock, her girl showed no signs of cracking, even in her sorrow. Rose had gravitated toward people like that all of her life. Whether it was Matthew, Mary, Atticus, George, or Rachel, she always fled to those who could protect her from herself and her naïve heart in times of hurt. So when she found her little girl missing in the middle of the night, her mind went to the worst things in the world. She was afraid of losing her too, no matter how irrational it was.

But from the moment she walked into the room, she was shocked still. The last thing she had expected when she came downstairs in search of Rachel was to find this. The Library wrecked while Robert and Cora watched her papa tensely bracing …

"Oh my god …" She whispered. "George?" She said in shock at first. Slowly tears formed in her eyes, tears of joy. "Oh god, my darling, is that you?" There was nothing but warmth and love in her voice. The weight lifted just a little bit off her soul as she walked toward him. "You're alive … thank god, you're alive!" She sniffed and went toward him. She hadn't lost him.

Rose hadn't lost both of them in one day.

"Get …!"

It was a nasally sort of hiss that escaped George as he immediately stumbled backed from Rose, matching each one of her bare footed steps in the opposite way. "You!" He pointed to her. "Don't you touch me!" He warned her aggressively.

The woman's eyes fell and her heart sank. "George, darling, it's … it's me." She took a step forward in confusion.

"Get away from me!" He shouted at her. "You stay away from me!" He said shakily.

Robert frowned. "George, it's alright." He said cautiously, holding a hand out, as if calming a growling dog ready to strike. "It's only Rose." He said in confusion.

"It's me, George … darling, please, **I love you** , remember? **Remember that I'll always love you?** " She asked.

The minute she took another step forward, George danced back, angrily looking to Cora, watching in puzzlement. "Keep that _bitch_ away from me!" He snapped.

"George!"

"Keep her away from me … get that bitch away from me!" He began to scream hysterically. "He showed me the movies! He showed me the movies!" He began to rant. "You whore, he showed me!" He began to rage at her.

Quickly Thomas, JJ, Robert, and Shrimpie began to restrain a fevered and delirious George when he charged at Rose who had tears in her eyes. It seemed, in the heated moment, no one knew what he was talking about. But the golden haired Dowager Countess did. Lord only knew she knew exactly what he was talking about.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, George!" She covered her mouth as she began to sob hysterically.

"I killed them! I killed them to save you! Get … get off me! I saw the movie! I killed them for you! And you made them movies!"

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

 _Get down to the wire here, guys. There's about four chapters left, possibly five. So if you've got any thoughts on the story, now is as good a time as any to leave a review._

 _A disclaimer to the Medical talk … everything stated in the chapter is completely, 100% accurate and a real thing. But, I'm not really sure, airing on the side of not, that Histocompatibility was something they knew about it in late 1920 or could test for._

 _So, the elephant in the room. Yes, Rose was the first person George ever had sex with. Believe it or not, this was set up very early in the story, as early as chapter three there were hints if you care to check. For the people grossed out, yes it's wrong. For the people offended, I'd like to point out that George and Rose are as closely related biologically as Matthew and Mary, literally. That being said, if you're not okay with it … you're not supposed to be, because, neither is George. From the word go on this story, George and Rose's relationship was set up to be dark and kinda twisted._

 _And finally, if you're interested in a prequel to this story I'm also doing a Dunkirk story titled "The Bonny Light Horsemen" which covers George's involvement on the last day of Operation Dynamo, as hinted in this story. So if you like this story and want more of it, there is, just check the profile or the Downton Tag._

 _Probably not the best chapter to promote that … all things considered._


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